Is web 2.0 dead or is business replacing buzzyness ?

You must have felt this agitation that went through the blogosphere these last day, but that was also relayed by traditional medias. Web 2.0 is dead. The rumor didn’t start from this note from Michael Arrington but since he’s got a bigger loudhailer than most of the population his voice carried farer. Then hundreds if not thousands of people predicted the end of web 2.0.

I can’t see anything particularly cleaver when some people say that when the economy’s going through hard times, the more fragile companies may come off badly. Among those companies there’s no need to have a second sight to guess all those that operates on an emerging market may be concerned, which is the case for web 2.0 startups…but not only. Not enough to convince me of real soothsayer abilities, nor to applause such perceptiveness, knowing it’s easy to ring the alarm when the city is burning just when you’ve been knowing fire raisers were at work for a long time. Those who were pushing for “everything 2.0″ even without sense or business model, prefering the “buzzyness model” could wonder about their past analysis. They themselves killed “their” web 2.0, turning it into a hudge holdall where they put everything and anything. But once smoke will be gone, many interesting things will remain, the only things that value creation can rely on, that makes it possible to build real business models. For this reason, I see these troubled times we’re experiencing as a salutary stabilization phase. I’ll end with a comparison with our late web 1.0. Even if some babies were thrown with the bathwater, companies that adresses a real need, that delivered a real valuable service, survived the crisis and are still alive.

In brief, I’d rather rank the “web 2.0 is dead” buzzword in the “who lives on noise can only survive making more noise” category.

So, what’s about Enterprise 2.0 ?

[Read more...]