Bubble on the Brain
Marc Andreessen talks about Bubble 2.0, or the lack of bubble 2.0, and why the doom and gloom scenario might be totally hosed wrong.
The whole idea behind Bubble 2.0 is that you have a number of web sites that are starting out as copycat ideas, or that really do not do anything all that original, outside of cool cat ideas like Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, and others who either promoted better than the competitors, or had an idea that worked better than their competitors.
This time around Marc does point out one very important issue, that many companies are not going IPO like the frenzy between 1996 and 2000, rather they have cool tech and they end up getting bought out by bigger more stable companies. Marc notes:
Note also what you don’t see in the theoretical Web 2.0 bubble of 2007. IPO’s. Lots and lots and lots of IPO’s. For a theoretical bubble, that is just plain odd. Fourth, getting more specific about Internet businesses — things have changed a lot since the late 90’s. Source: Parca.com
The point of all this is that yes, for some folks finding a good original idea out there is difficult. Some folks are starting web 2.0 businesses because they did not like how something was run, or they thought they could do something better than the competitors and bring more value to the people who will use the service.
Venture funding is up, people are taking on the established first to market folks crowding some markets, some first to market are adding additional value add like Digg’s proposed review system, the ecosystem keeps on growing. Making it big in America as an audience is not the only way to go, Orkut might be dead in America, but in Brazil it is the service to use. Marketing to Brazil might be hard, but it is doable, and an audience is an audience.
Maybe no bubble, maybe a bubble, people are doing what they are doing anyways, and that is really what the web 2.0 market is all about at this point. People just doing things because they think they can do them better, or provide more value to end users.
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