Web 2.0: Obsolete within three years?
SAN FRANCISCO--One of the biggest booths at the Web 2.0 Expo here belongs to a very un-Web 2.0-ish kind of guy.
Remember Steve Perlman? He's one of those tech wunderkinds who piled up a laundry list of achievements over the last couple of decades--to the point where their predictions about technology carry more weight than most mere mortals. In his case, the highlights include leading the Apple development team whose technology led to QuickTime and later co-founding WebTV (later sold to Microsoft for a half billion or so.)
(Credit:
CNET News.com)
Perlman has been working at Rearden, an incubation firm he founded in 2000 that has some cool companies in its network, including Mova and Moxi Digital. Perlman was at Web 2.0 to show the corporate flag and sign up new talent. Though neither he nor his team would say what was on deck, they were playing it up as quite a big deal.
"At least two of the technologies we have are getting ripe on the vine," he said. The big tease. (By the way, Tom Paquin, who ran engineering at Netscape, does the same at Reardon.)
Interestingly, Perlman isn't very impressed by most of what falls under the rubric of "Web 2.0." Coming from someone with his technical pedigree, I was intrigued when he added: "Most of what you see here will be obsolete in three or four years."
Unfortunately, I was already running late when he offered those bons mots at the end of my interview and didn't have enough time to get into that. Hopefully, I can reconnect at the company's party this evening.
******
I did manage to catch up with Perlman. Here's what he had to say (over the din of a pounding electric-muzak like attack on our eardrums.)
"What we've been seeing is a huge change in the way people manage their data and the way applications handle data. We've been working on the assumption that the gold standard for communications was a 1.5 megabit T-1 line. Like, you had it made! Well, today, that just sucks. Most people can get 3 to 6 megabits. So you're seeing richer flash animations on pages and that's beginning to change the way people think about stuff."
Such as?
"They're adding new things as the Web becomes richer. But a lot of the sites you see out there tend to be very static. You go from one static page to another static page. They may call themselves Web 2.0 but it's Web 1.0 in terms of interactivity....I was walking around the floor (at the conference) and asking myself, `Where is the video?' It's not there. And that's going to have repercussions."
Charles Cooper has covered technology and business for more than 25 years. Before joining CNET News, he worked at the Associated Press, Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet. E-mail Charlie. 
- by StevePerlman April 24, 2008 10:23 AM PDT
- As Charles mentioned, I made the obsolescence comment without qualification at the show, and then we caught up at the Rearden Web Crawl party last night where it was hard to talk. He did a good distillation of what came to my mind at the party, but of course, there is a lot to say.<br /><br />First, I generally agree with the prior comments that you can count on Web technology obsolesence in 3 years no matter what, and that there is far more than video that we'll be seeing that wil extend what we are seeing today. But what I was really driving toward was that bandwidth and compute power growth are going to dramatically improve what we currently consider to be the "least common denominator" platform that we currently target Web applications toward.<br /><br />When Netscape Navigator was introduced, there was 10s of thousands of bits/second of bandwidth (5 digits), and most of the Web was about text and small images. A T1 line, with 1.5Mbps (7 digits) of bandwidth at an office was considered the "gold standard" for connectivity, but was not generally available to the consumer (or many businesses). With the advent of early DSL and cable modems we saw 128kbps and higher (6 digits), and in the last few years we've seen speeds gradually grow to millions of bps (7 digits), catching up to and exceeding the T1 download speed. And very recently 10s of millions of bits per second (8 digits), have been available. So, now a significant percentage of your target audience now has a faster (downstream) connection than what used to be the gold standard T1 line, when Netscape designed Navigator (which ultimately shaped HTTP). When you combine that speed with the compute power to render decent video and animation (e.g. using Flash 9/Silverlight clients), it changes your least common denominator that you can design to. And, connections and processing power are only going to get faster.<br /><br />But, very few Web2.0 applications that I've been seeing have fully exploited the richness that is possible in the post-T1 line era. A lot of the people Rearden has been working with are still wrapping their heads around the possibilities, and are often surprised to see what is possible with high-production value Flash/Silverlight and video, and what a wide audience is now reachable with the expectation of high download bandwidth.<br /><br />And, given what we've been seeing people doing who have been working with us on advanced Web2.0 systems, when I compare what is in the labs vs. what they are showing publicly today, it is just night and day. "Life past the T1" will result in a sea change of the look, feel and capability of Web2.0 applications (no matter how you define Web2.0...and there are many definitions). You don't realize how many assumptions are tied around the limitations of a narrow pipe until you start working with the expectation of a broad pipe. And the stuff coming out is simply mind-blowing.<br /><br />Steve Perlman<br />Presiden & CEO<br />Rearden
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