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Mark Cuban throws out one of his periodic flamethrower blog comments. This time the Internet is dead and boring.
A lot of people are all up and upset about my comments that the Internet is dead and boring. Well guess what, it is. Every new technological, mechanical or intellectual breakthrough has its day, days, months and years. But they don’t rule forever. That’s the reality.
Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes,highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I’m sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions “dead and boring”. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.
Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.
Talk about a divisive comment. This topic comes up every once in a while, the last time I remember hearing about it was 2002. No VC money = lack of innovation. Arguable point but what about the 2001-2005 nuclear winter of consumer-based Internet applications?
I don’t think it has much to do with bandwidth. We’re slower than the rest of the world for sure but Myspace is not very bandwidth-intensive. Five years ago we had Mapquest and nascent social networks and blogs, most people simply weren’t clued into them yet. The readers of blogs like this are the 20% hard-core netizens, and we have different perspectives than most net users.
Development tools are better today (Ning, Yahoo Pipes, Eclipse) but companies are still not opening up to user-centric data which is what’s going to drive the next iteration of the web. The identity provider comment on Mark’s blog was interesting, I’ve been thinking about that for several years now. The good news is that the blogosphere is doing it’s job and embracing a growing discussion about social graphs and universal profiles, which will lead companies to investigate and someone is going to come up with a way to make money off of these concepts.
