Peter Rip writes:
Many of us in the VC community have been quietly wondering about the state of Web 2.0 innovation. We arent seeing much. Startup activity remains strong, but the consumer web landscape seems to be populated with the same bodies with different skins. Another video deal here; another social networking deal there, and social [feature] everywhere.
…
The next wave of innovation isn’t going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform. To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn’t exist today.The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website. This is no different than the world before the Windows Clipboard. All 640KB of memory was available to whatever application was running. The point of integration was the User. As it is today. Ask anyone who uses a SaaS application.
