Web 2.0 is one of those over-used, possibly over-hyped, buzz terms that seems to flourish in circles of marketers and investors. I mentioned Web 2.0 in a post last week while discussing the future of search technology, search engines and the way users interact with them. Web 2.0, in some form, will more than likely change search and the internet – but it certainly doesn’t stop there.
Here is the beginning of Wikipedia’s definition for Web 2.0:
“Web 2.0 generally refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online. In contrast to the first generation, Web 2.0 gives users an experience closer to desktop applications than the traditional static Web pages…” – Wikipedia.com
So, it’s relatively easy to see how technology used in sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Google Co-op, etc. are poised to change the way we interact with the ol’ interweb.
What hasn’t been quite as clear, to me anyhow, is how Web 2.0 is poised to change the way we use our computers at home and on the job, how we use software, and how the entire tech industry operates.
I was just having a conversation today about how bloated Microsoft Office products seem to be. I would guess that most of could do 75% or more of our text editing using MS WordPad, which is bundled with Windows XP. BUT, Microsoft cleverly leaves out one critical component in WordPad – a spell checker – forcing us to fork over the dough for MS Word, when WordPad would be more than sufficient for creating and printing or sending most of what we need a text editor for.
*As a side note, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with Apple’s bundled text editor in OS X Tiger on my new MacBook, which does include spell check AND even saves and opens files in Word’s .doc file format. They’ve done it perfectly; I can use it for most of what I need a text editor for and can choose to purchase Word or another editor if I need more. Apple recognized that a basic, and usable, text editor should be standard in an OS; it does everything most users need without all the advance features that many don’t (so it can afford to be bundled).
After reading the following article from BusinessWeek Online (which I discovered on Digg), I realized that Web 2.0 may have an even bigger effect on software, how we buy it and use it, and how bloated, expensive software that tries to be everything to everybody may soon be a thing of the past.
This may be the best part of the movement towards Web 2.0. The BusinessWeek piece is a great primer on where we may be headed from one of the dudes with the cha-ching to make it happen.
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