Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Industry Note: Zardoz and the Death of Web 2.0

It's hard to imagine a deeper betrayal of the real principles of www 2.0 - the great leveller, it's about people, blah, blah - than putting Rupert Murdoch (!) front and center of the biggest conference about it.

It's shades of Zardoz - the shrivelled old dude hidden in the bowels of the castle, who's still pulling the real strings, and making everyone dance to his out-of-kilter tune.

This is (to put it bluntly) a sellout. Everyone's got dollar-signs in their eyes, their long term vision clouding over. Even, unfortunately, the O'Reilly kru - who've been ignoring the deeper economic issues of 2.0 for way (way) too long.

Fine. Every movement has it's sellout moment.

The real point is that from a strategic pov, that moment also usually coincides with the peak of a bubble.

Another interesting point is just how radically different Chris's edge strategy is from Rupert's time-tested slash-and-burn core focus (ie, buy it, hollow it out, scale it, monopsonize it).

If you're an optimist, I suppose, you could see it kind of as a changing of the guard...

-- umair // 5:31 PM // 0 comments

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