It seems such a short time ago that RSS was being discovered by the masses and put to use, then Twitter comes along and rapidly expands from pointless short-form broadcasting to real-time news feed, and just like that the bloggers are starting to write off RSS. Too slow, too clunky, too old, and this and the other… but before the “publish” button is hit on some of these articles, the popular blog publishing platform, WordPress (now popular + 1 with the recent addition of this blog), announces RSSCloud functionality. This professes to eliminate the time lag of RSS and make syndication instant. And the blogosphere erupts in a joyful frenzy.
At roughly the same time, Opera announces 10 million downloads in a single week of its sleek new web browser, the existence of which is apparently in reaction to Google Chrome and Firefox being too slow. Google Chrome and Firefox will undoubtedly react, and will be speedier than ever. And the blogosphere will erupt in a joyful frenzy. I could bring up the introduction of Microsoft’s Bing search engine as another illustration of sleek newness and frenzied response, but that was so early-Summer, ages ago, and I try to be current.
The mixed bag of applications and consumer-facing web services mentioned in this article – Twitter, RSS, WordPress, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Bing – all have important attributes in common: all free, all sleek, all easy to use, all for the mass market, and in select groupings, overlapping. (And I might add, on a certain level, all in the “cloud“. This is increasingly important.) When functionality begins to coincide, when speed reaches a practical limit (as these eventually will), and when everything is in the cloud (as is being predicted), what then?
Back in business school this sort of thing would be a case study in product life cycle, an illustration of a commodity environment. When products become interchangeable, they are commodities, and commodities, the professors told us, compete on price. But wait. There is no price to compete on when everything is free… And so, an industry at the mercy of whim and fashion? Perhaps. It seems to have worked for Facebook… although a closer look at Facebook, now that it has matured, reveals a different fundamental: stickiness through variety. In old business school lingo, this is a supermarket that you never want to exit, and the more you stay, the more you can’t leave if you tried. Another example: Google: the popular RSS reader, blogging platform, messaging service, document management system, phone service, video distribution platform, and soon operating system, and soon Google Wave. What am I forgetting? Ah yes, search engine.
I could go on. But the idea is there for the grasping. As the web evolves swiftly towards commoditization, the differentiator may become variety itself.
