To: xxxx <vxxx@xxxx.org>
From: Simon Wistow <simon[at-diddley-at]thegestalt.org>
Subject: (xxxx) MacLash
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 12:08:52 +0000
It's traditional at the start of the year to make various predictions.
And so I put forward three possibilities to you, my fellow (void)-ers
[0] all to do with a backlash against current trends because I'm too
unimaginative to think of something constructive.
In some ways I think this is mostly projecting my own fears and
prejudices but, heh, it's a starting point. I'm just trying to stimulate
conversation, ya know.
1) The aforementioned MacLash
---------------------------------
It's a witty pun. Well, sort of. I could have called it the iBacklash.
Or jumping the iShark.
Mac hardware is getting bad reputation (whether deserved or not) for
failure. It's not the cheapest or the best specced any more. It's not
even the prettiest (IMO anyway). The iPod has several competitors
snapping at its heels that are cheaper, larger and have more features.
The mini iPod was a disapointment (probably because of over hyped
expectations but hey, if you're a company that thrives on hype then
sometimes it's going to bite you on the arse) and the last two keynotes
have contained nothing of excitement.
Could this be the year that the much vaunted Apple Comeback[tm] starts
to fade?
2) Google loses its crown
---------------------------------
True, I've drunk the Yahoo! Kool-Aid and then passed the cup onto Mr
Batistoni but, and I've been saying this for a while, Google is heading
for a fall.
The search business is a fickle one - the big players (Y!, Altavista et
al) have all had their day in the sun and then been superceded. Google,
to be fair to it, has done much better than most on not sold out
(although the others had the pressures of the Gold Rush to contend with)
and added some nifty features.
On the other hand the quality of the results has been getting steadily
worse adn they've started adding some controversial commerical features
such as sponsored matches, google ads and, the strangely undermentioned
but frankly distasteful DomainPark
http://www.google.com/domainpark/
They don't update as fast as other crawlers (FAST, Inktomi, AV - all
owned by Yahoo incidentally) and they're having problems adding more
pages since their 32bit ID ran out of spaces - and with the much vaunted
>10,000 commodity box server farm they've hit a problem whereby they
can't seem to fix that without crippling crawling speeds even more.
With the Yahoo! switch from Inktomi (more to do with falling quality
than rivalry than people might think - after all Y! owns >20% of Google,
they can't lose) the market share becomes 52% to 48% with Yahoo gaining
every month. And Yahoo has bigger coffers, more users and better
established services ... and a bigger reach among families.
And let's not even get started about MSN who are hiring like mad and
throwing *silly* amounts of money at their search business.
It's a big money game - sponsored matches in the US alone are worth 1.7
billion USD to Overture and they couldn't grow fast enough. Do Google
have the chops, the cajones and, more importantly, war chest enough to
survive?
3) Blogs schmogs
---------------------------------
They've been lauded in everything from Time Magazine to Oprah, they've
been touted as a way to break the strangle hold of the traditional
media, as a new way of publishing as the cure for cancer as a dessert
topping *AND* a floor wax.
But let's face it, in general they're a bunch of whiny, self important
fucks detailing theirmind numbingly mundane days, giving mad props to
others in the cabal, making endless list to show how well read, well
listened, /cultured/ they are and just occasionally opining forth on
subjects they don't know enough about.
There are exceptions but that's a good rule of thumb.
A chronological diary is almost the worst way to organise most data.
Whilst I like innovations such as trackbacks (I have evil ideas to do
with the homogenisation of conversations across mediums) and promotion
of things such as RSS, CSS/XHTML and Creative Commons it still stands
that they're polluting the information stream (even if other search
engines aren't as susceptible as Google they're still a tricky problem).
The good(?) news - there's nothing new to write about them anymore and
once they lose that frisson of newness and the ego stoking warmth from
lazy editorialists their number will decrease and soon they'll be just
another inoffensive part of the whole web experience.
...
Comments?
Other predictions that I've heard ...
--------------------------------------
Linux On The Desktop [tm] (hah!)
Another pseudo Dot.Com-esque gold rush (shortly followed by another
crash)
An exodus of western brains to India (although I've also heard Eastern
Europe)
[0] I'm tempted to put in something like "and our staunch allies - the
denizens of london.pm"