Andreessen: In the middle of what was a pretty horrific recession we now have 10 times more people on the Internet now than we did five years ago. We’ve got 10 times or a hundred times more broadband. We’ve got Internet advertising, which is a real phenomenon. We have a whole generation of citizens now used to doing business online, used to buying things online, and used to communicating online.
On the technology side, we’ve had over that period about a 10 times reduction in price in a lot of components that go into building the Internet and building services on the Internet, like servers and software and networking equipment.
All that’s really adding up. The economics of the Internet have undergone something like a thousand-times swing. If you’re going to launch an Internet site or an Internet business today, it’s probably going to cost about a tenth of what it would have cost five years ago, but you’re going to have 10 times more consumers you can address and probably 10 times the advertising revenue. There’s a seriousness and commitment and dedication and effort and investment going into it now that is a lot more interesting and a lot more real than what was happening in the ’90s.
Also, scroll down for Jurvetson on search, he mentions an interesting sounding company called Tacit….
Tacit’s been around for quite some time… Not new at all, and not really as interesting as it sounds. There are a few other companies working on similar technology, and the general results is that it scares the crap out of people – because it’s scanning through their email and making assumptions about them. In fact, when Tacit first came around, prior to the big social networking craze, many people wouldn’t go anywhere near it. Now that they’ve repositioned themselves as a social networking play they’re suddenly getting more attention – but the problem is still the same: people don’t like the idea that their employers (or anyone) will be digging through their email to determine who and what they know.