O'Reilly: von der Web-Applikation zur Plattform

interessante Betrachtungsweise von O’Reilly zu Web-Startups (aufgrund der Betrachtung von etablierten Suchmaschinen-Anbietern und Such-Startups), Search Startups Are Dead, Long Live Search Startups:

I came to that same conclusion several years ago, when I was on the board of Nutch, the open source search engine based on Lucene. Great software, but without the funding to take the operations to scale, it could never become more than a research platform.

In my talks on Web 2.0, I always end with the point that „a platform beats an application every time.“ We’re entering the platform phase of Web 2.0, in which first generation applications are going to turn into platforms, followed by a stage in which the leaders use that platform strength to outperform their application rivals, eventually closing them out of the market. And that platform is not enforced by control over proprietary APIs, as it was in the Windows era, but by the operational infrastructure, and perhaps even more importantly, by the massive databases (with network effects creating increasing returns for the database leaders) that are at the heart of Web 2.0 platforms.

But as Bill notes, this doesn’t mean the end of the application category. It just means that developers need to move up the stack, adding value on top of the new platform, rather than competing to become it.

An sich steht nichts anderes dahinter als die Frage, wie man sich eigentlich vor der Konkurrenz schützen kann, wo doch alles im Web kopierbar ist.