Duncan Davidson is a good friend of ours. He is full of wisdom and wit. He is an ace photographer and occasionally he stops by at one of our events. And he knows pretty much anyone who is to know. So when he says something, I pay attention. You should too.
Another decade and some later, I was standing on a stage in Las Vegas giving a presentation about Java Servlets. The dot-com bubble was fully inflated and while I talked about setting HTTP response headers to a crowd full of developers looking to build the next hot website, I suddenly felt the chill breeze. As it turned out, the inflated stock price of Sun Microsystems—the company I was working for and was heavily invested in—was just days away from its inevitable peak and fall.
I think we all knew it had to come, but the storm was still a surprise when it hit. The deluge was sudden and cold. It was shocking how fast the world we were in changed.
There’s another storm coming. The wind is picking up. The smell of rain is in the air. Thunder is starting to crack out in the distance. It’s still too early to tell for sure, but it seems we’re about to get really wet again.
A few things bode well for web technology/anti-bubble talk in my view: 1. People aren’t yet paying for very much across the web (premium content, small-fee access, etc.). We all know that’s coming, so that’s good for web. 2. The economy is slow enough that people want more web info before the make decisions; there are still a whole lot of inefficiencies and problems in the economy that web technology is fixing by the day, and people are trusting more. 3. Not everyone is maximizing their mobile device to accelerate small buying, just the early adopters are. And that will only shift to more users. And 4., we’re only just now seeing consumers beginning to build a real “web identity” and take control of that; it’s just getting started.
The web may be saturated with ideas and startup projects right now, but we’ve also yet to see the REAL influx of users’ activity. That’s still exciting, and should be why the web more than anything else leads economic growth.