Mark Cuban, the twinkle-toed maverick that he is, posits that the Internet is Dead and Boring.
In his post, he declares the following:
...the net has become...[a] utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.
Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet is evolving. Actually it is the exact opposite. Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet has stopped evolving and stabilized as a platform.
The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today.
The Internet is boring. That is not a bad thing. In fact its easy to make the argument that its a great thing. That it has become the utility that the people who worked to get it started firmly believed it would. That it finally is the platform for any number of mundane applications that are easy to write and that anyone can use and trust. Just like wheels, printing presses, cars, TV, radio, electricity, water.....
Let me start by putting on (when was it ever off?) my marketing hat and agreeing with the boring part, but most certainly not the dead contention. Interactive agencies are for the most part, acquisition factories (literally and figuratively). The number of fierce and original independents is becoming anemic and in its place is an army of 1984-like clones, intent on replicating, duplicating and imitating old school worst practices in and across new platforms.
In a previous life, I used to be an evangelist on the part of nascent online creative, but for the most part I haven't seen a thing of interest in recent times...not coincidentally the same period that I haven't seen (or remembered) a single 30-second spot that caught my eye, kept my attention, won my heart and opened my wallet.
Boring is right on the money. Perhaps dead is actually dead on as well. We're quickly approaching a mainstreaming of the Web and with it, will come the inevitable commoditization of creativity and first mover advantage.
Now back to Mark. He's really referring directly to the Web as a "universal dial-tone", much like the tone you hear when you pick up those relics called land-lines. He's referring to the land line in context of game-changers like wi-fi, VoIP, in-world audio, dynamically switching iPhones (between wi-fi and the Edge network)
I completely agree with the challenge to upgrade and fast-track the ability to improve bandwidth. Upload times still horribly lag download times and until they equalize, perhaps the web experience will be dead and boring.
I also think that until we are able to make sure we put an internet connection (high speed, wireless) in the hands of every single consumer/citizen (and yes, that means a computer of some sort to accompany the connection), we will stay stuck in the dead and boring zone.
I'm not sure I agree with underplaying the impact and potential of Web 2.0 however. That said, I would contend that many Web 2.0 plays are just money making scams at worst - or perhaps I should say, more solid bubble reincarnations.
If, as the saying goes, life is what you make it, then so too is the Web. And perhaps Mark's assertion that the web is dead and boring is really nothing more than a transferred epithet and if that is the case, then perhaps it is us that are dead and boring.
Time to prove Mark wrong and if we do, we will all be the better for it.
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