Final Panel

Yesterday I was a guest at SinnerSchrader's Next10Years congress on "The Chances of Web 2.0" and their 10-year birthday party. The location was appropriate for the about 500 participants at the congress and maybe 1000 party guests. Despite Matthias Schrader cautioning that the congress was in good Web 2.0 tradition only "beta", the organizers deserve full credit for a well organized event. While there was music outside there was only a cocktail bar missing outside :(, where many guests stayed until late in the night due to the fine weather.

I won't go into the details of the congress presentations, because there are some live blogs and the whole event was video taped. The videos will be made available in a few days [Update: now available here]. I belonged to the (hopefully few) guests who didn't learn much new about Web 2.0, but many others were brick and mortar customers of SinnerSchrader which may have heard and seen some things for the first time. I went there with an idea of what the next big thing will be (kind of killer-app in the true sense of the word) and went away quite assured. But mainly it was a networking event, meeting many bloggers, the usual suspects from the local business community, even some developers, and last but not least the SinnerSchrader people.

I'll only comment on two topics here:

  • Matthias Schrader explained that, because now 80% of Germans are online, companies will increasingly have to fight for market share on quality of service instead of relying on market growth. This is especially interesting because it's more and more difficult to get and retain the right IT people. While Web 2.0 may give users a much better user experience, the underlying technologies (e.g. AJAX) are more complex and require more highly skilled developers than those for Web 1.0. While they are deceptively easy to use, in the hands of inexperienced or mediocre developers the resulting applications will finally descend into performance, scalability and maintenance hell. The price question is: Who will foot the horrendous bill - the application providers or the user organizations?
  • For the final panel it was a little bit ridiculous for most participants to protest the difficulty of predicting the next 10 years - at a conference called the "next10years". My conclusion from this discussion is that the central theme of the next 10 years will be a vicious battle between companies trying to erect walled gardens to use the network effects in their favour against their competitors and the users trying to tear down these walls to decrease switching cost and thus force companies to compete on quality instead of the width of the moat. I will definitely side with the users and support fiefdom busters.

Some resources:

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