Reading Brad Feld's blog recently took me to Peter Rip's fairly new blog. I worked briefly with Peter once -- giving a sort of "second opinion" on a startup company -- and I am finding his blog a gem.
I don't agree with all his observations, but every post has informed me on topics I care about. Here are some snippets:
... this is the real promise of 'mashups' - the atomization of web services and the open publication of APIs. Imagine building a real "Travel Agent" mashup that aggregates all the advisory sites and the transportation / lodging aggregators, and even some event stuff. That kind of super site is well beyond the scope of today's mashups and well beyond the scope of today's (non-existent) business models for mashups. I think this is an important part of the maturation of Web 2.0 from an idea into a platform.
This really is the promise of SaaS, web services, the ASP model and all that Web 2.0 hype. However, I think the new technologies merely make this achievable -- they don't make it easy. They also don't ensure the new value goes to venture-backed companies. E.g. American Express is well on the way to federating the travel resources.
... There may be an upgrade cycle for Office which will boost short term earnings, but there is a much bigger migration cycle as people do Net Work instead of Desktop Work. And the smartest developers of the AJAX Office are capitalizing on this.
The problem with "net work" is that so much of it is scavenging information from a number of sources, and that teh network is still (and likley always will be) less capabale/available than our ability to process and store data. RSS and OPML are signs we'll see the first problem tackled, but we are crying out for a solution that will address the "occasionally connecetd but always productive" challenge. However, I have to agree with Peter that Office may not be the solution either.
On the Web 2.0 Entrepreneur bubble, Peter compares the rash of entrepreneurs with an investment bubble:
... To me this Entrepreneur Bubble feels like the PC software bubble in the early 80's. As the installed base of personal computers exploded, individual software developers founded companies because it was an order of magnitude cheaper than before. But as the field quickly glutted with dozens of similar companies in each category, the choke point became distribution, leading to the structure of the market we see today. Today's three person startup on LAMP is 1981's Pascal developer. The few that got rich did well. The many that didn't quit their day jobs did OK. And those who quit their day jobs and didn't get rich.... learned something.
It may be tiresome fielding calls from all these eager enterpreneurs, but a bubble of entrepreneurs is not a bubble at all. It involves far fewer people, less money, and a much larger proportion of people who are involved are closely involved with (and react to) the realities of their business: its prospects, progress and results.
...I own no shares of Skype. I have lots of other Voip and messaging tools on my machine. Skype is nice, but proprietary. I don't care who buys it or even if it goes away. And I don't care who Paris Hilton is doing this week, either.
LOL.
I'll be subscribing to Peter's blog.
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