Category: Book Related

The Internet Big Five By Product Strength

As I have written in previous predictions, I’ve been focusing on the Internet Big Five lately, and expect that to continue this year, as the group, collectively, are something of a “character” in my upcoming book (as is Twitter, the “free radical”). Other characters include “The Government” and “Corporations,” so expect predictions about those players in the next few days. But today, I want to focus on the Big Five as a whole. I’ve been staring at these companies, trying to understand their strategic imperatives, which is why I found myself making yet another chart.

This one focuses on core product lines where all (or most) of these companies are playing. For me, these product lines, taken together, are the basis of what we might call “the operating system of our lives.” And since the book is about how we will be leveraging our lives over digital platforms in one generation, it struck me as important to assess where each of the Big Five is right now (what they have already built) and where they are weak (what they need to build to compete).

Here’s the chart:

As you can see, I’ve laid out the same five companies, listed top to bottom by market cap. From left to right are columns of various product lines or offerings that I’ve determined are crucial areas that any player in the “OS of our life” must address. I’ve keyed each company against each product line with one of four scores, from “Strong” – where a company already dominates – to “Weak” – where a company either does not play, or has an anemic offering. The terms “Developing” and “Improving” demonstrate that the company is making progress in that area, from either a weak position (“Developing”) or a middling position (“Improving”).

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Predictions 2012 #3: The Facebook Ad Network

For my third prediction of the year, I’m going with one just a tad bit less obvious than “Facebook will go public.” There seems to be no doubt about that event occurring this year, though I’ve certainly heard intelligent folks argue that Facebook can and should figure out how to stay private. I’ve argued that Facebook ought to be a public company, if only to be held (somewhat) accountable given all the data it has on our lives.

But this prediction has to do with Facebook announcing and then launching a web-wide advertising network along the lines of Google’s AdSense. I’ve talked about this for years (short handing it as “FaceSense,”) and I’ve asked Mark Zuckerberg, Carolyn Everson, Bret Taylor, and Sheryl Sandberg about it on stage and off. The answer is always the same: We’re not interested in launching a web ad network at this time.

I predict that line will change in 2012. Here’s why:

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Searchblog 2011: The Year In Writing

I’ve done this a few times in the past, and this year I’m feeling the need to review all I wrote in 2011, and highlight the best posts (at least, by my own measure). Even though my writing in the past year withered to an average of two or three posts a week, I still managed to get some meaningful ideas out there, and I intend to redouble my efforts in 2012. Herewith, my list of favorites from the past year, in order of appearance:

Predictions 2011 The first substantive post of 2011, by my own reckoning last month, I did pretty well.

What Everyone Seems to Miss In Facebook’s Private or Public Debate… I make the point that a company with this much data should be accountable to the public.

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Predictions 2012: #1 – On Twitter and Media

2012 is going to be a year of contrasts – of consolidation of power for the Internet Big Five, and fragmentation and disruption of that power due to both startups as well as government and consumer action. I’ve spent the past few weeks jotting down thoughts for 2012, and hope to do the Year That Is About To Be justice in the following set of posts.

Yes, I said “set of posts,” because for the first time since the birth of this blog (that’d be nine years ago), I’m going to post my predictions one by one. Why? Well, because I’d like to dig in a bit on each. If I do it all in one post, we’d have a *very* long read, and most of you are just too busy for that. I don’t plan to release these posts slowly, I’m just going to write till I’m done, so ideally I’ll be done in a few days. And when I’ve finished, I’ll post a summary of them all, for those of you who want all these predictions in one easily linkable place.

So let’s start with Prediction #1: Twitter will become a media company, and the only “free radical of scale” in our Internet ecosystem. 

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2011 Predictions: How Did I Do?

(image) For many years now I’ve made predictions, and for just as many years I review how I did. This is the week I do the reviewing, my predictions for 2012 should arrive around the New Year, assuming I find the right inspiration.

2011 was a strange year in many ways. We lost Steve Jobs, stupid Internet legislation reared its ugly head yet again in the form of SOPA, Internet IPOs came back in a big way (but didn’t perform as well as most would have liked), and the world woke up to the implications of programmatic buying and Big Data, in a Very Big Way.

As I look back on my predictions of twelve months ago, I think I did a pretty good job, but left plenty of room for improvement. Here’s a rundown of how I did, with some supporting citations, where appropriate:

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Google Does Its Tenth Annual Zeitgeist

Ten years ago, Google’s first Zeitgeist inspired my first book (The Search). Here are some highlights from the tenth annual edition. Props to Google for going deeper than most year end lists with its data. Now…open source the damn data, folks!!!

 

 

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On This Whole “Web Is Dead” Meme

The Web is dead again, at least, according to a widely covered speech by Forrester Research’s George Colony.

Speaking at Le Web last week, Colony claimed that the HTML web is a poorly architected half step in the next, obvious progression of platforms: a hybrid between what we’ve come to know as the Web and the crippled chicletized place I’ve been calling AppWorld. In a stroke of nomenclature insight, Colony calls this new platform the App-Internet.

Colony argues that, unlike apps, the Web doesn’t leverage the processing and storage power of edge devices (like the iPad or a smartphone, for example. Or, say, an old school computer, like the one I’m using right now to write this post.)

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Neal Stephenson on Important Work

(image) An interesting interview in the NYT  I missed from last week, with noted author Neal Stephenson. In it, he riffs on something that’s been bugging me as I work on the book. Asked about “the future of computing,” he responds:

“I’ll tell you what I’d like to see happen,” he said, and began discussing what the future was supposed to have looked like, back in his 1960s childhood. He ticked off the tropes of what he called “techno-optimistic science fiction,” including flying cars and jetpacks. And then computers went from being things that filled a room to things that could fit on a desk, and the economy and industries changed. “The kinds of super-bright, hardworking geeky people who, 50 years ago, would have been building moon rockets or hydrogen bombs or what have you have ended up working in the computer industry, doing jobs that in many cases seem kind of ignominious by comparison.”

Again, a beat. A consideration, perhaps, that he is talking about the core readership for his best sellers. No matter. He’s rolling. He presses on.

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Instrumenting People Into Location Services

So this week a well known VC made the trek to my writing retreat in Marin, and we hung out in a room that until this year was a large storage closet behind my garage. I rethought the space, soundproofed it, added a hodge-podge of AV gear and musical instruments, and named the place the “Ross Social Club”  – on Foursquare, anyway. I haven’t really told anyone that I gave the place a name, but it was sort of an experiment – would anyone ever check in there besides me?

Now I chose that name for various reasons I won’t get into here (another story, one I’ll be glad to tell you over a bourbon). But I like being able to name a space on Foursquare, and it’s become a habit for me to “check in” whenever I actually use the room. It’s like  leaving a digital breadcrumb for me, a record of my new relationship to music (I’m learning to play the drums). A lot of friends hang out there too, often playing their own instruments or riffing on the whiteboards I’ve hung about the place. But  I don’t make it a habit to mention the room’s Foursquare doppelganger. It seems a bit … forced. And as far as I know, many of them don’t use the service.

On the same day I created the RSC on Foursquare (and probably because he asked me what I was doing on my phone), one fellow did check in. With some whimsy, he added a tip: “Try the wings.” It’d make you laugh if you’ve ever been there, trust me. Since then, in the past nine months, countless folks have been through the place, but only one other person has checked in.

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The Internet Big Five

As I work on the book, I’ve come to use a shorthand for five companies that I’ve determined are critical drivers of what kind of society we’ll be living in one generation from now. At the moment I’m focused on just Internet companies, though I also plan on looking at other categories, such as energy, food, and health.

My terminology has evolved in the past week from “the Five Horsemen” to simply “The Big Five.” I’ve got a few reasons for this. First, the Horsemen analogy is a bit negative (given it evokes the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse). Second, there’s a rather fun reference for the “big five” that has to do with personality traits (see this research, or this, for example). One goal of my book, which I should probably explain at a later date, is to tease out the essential character and philosophy – perhaps you could call it the personality – of each of these key Internet players. If corporations are people (in the US, anyway), I wonder what kind of people these companies might be?

I don’t think you’ll be surprised by my choice of the Big Five, but I do hope you’ll find my reasoning for their selection worthy. As you can see from the chart, the five are: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook.

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