http://blog.simeonov.com/2006/09/13/carson-workshops-summit-the-future-of-web-apps/ Simeon Simeonov on entrepreneurship, innovation & venture capital Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:31:28 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://blog.simeonov.com/2006/09/13/carson-workshops-summit-the-future-of-web-apps/#comment-112 Fri, 06 Oct 2006 22:07:52 +0000 http://simeons.wordpress.com/2006/09/13/carson-workshops-summit-the-future-of-web-apps/#comment-112 [...] I was at Web 1.0 companies (Allaire and later Macromedia) and helped put the groundwork for a number of the Web 2.0 technologies from XML to Web services to AJAX & RIAs. At a recent conference in SF, I was struck by (a) how old I felt compared to the Web 2.0 entrepreneurs (I’m 33) and (b) to what extent they saw themselves doing “completely new stuff” as one guy put it. True, there is lots of innovation but I also see tons of re-spins of old ideas with better UI and the benefits of some new standards. (Mike Arrington at TechCrunch had a slide on this in a presentation he gave recently in DC.) I also see some examples of brilliant branding with little net new innovation. (No, AJAX is not new. Lots of people were building AJAX-style apps back in 1998 but they never took off because cross-browser DHTML support sucked back then.) My point is not to gripe about the “young generation” but simply to point out that Web 2.0 (and SOA for that matter but that’s the topic of a much longer discussion) is a mixture of reality and spin. I’ve seen startups with ratios from 9 : 1 to 1 : 9. I like the former and I’ve noticed that many of them care more about building great products/services which delight their customers than the label du jour that’s attached to them. [...]

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