Phil Wainewright wrote an excellent post recently entitled The great Web 2.0 application
(s)mash-up. He starts by quoting Mohan Sawhney,
professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management:
“Five years from now, the concept of an application will be obsolete,” Sawhney
said. “They will all be services, combined, mixed, matched and reused as needed.”
Phil goes on to discuss the merits or otherwise of the various “services” vendors
lining up to be the dominant platforms and marketplaces in Web 2.0. Note that he
particularly focuses on Enterprise markets, whereas my interest is more in the
consumer/media markets. But there are crossovers – e.g. Amazon, which has been very quiet
this year compared to the other big Net companies, has filed a patent for a web services
marketplace (it was filed last year). Phil doesn’t sound convinced – yet – that any
of Amazon, Google, eBay, Microsoft or Yahoo will necessarily lead the services
ecosystem.
He then quotes my post a couple of weeks ago about a ‘Publisher Services’ company
being a dark horse in all this:
“Finally, there are the left-field players, many of them as yet
unknown or not considered as potential platforms. As Richard MacManus recently wrote,
“Publisher Services has a lot of potential and it may well be the category which delivers
the next Google.” He was writing specifically about RSS, but the notion applies equally
well to all on-demand services, not merely RSS. In the Web 2.0 economy, service
publishing and aggregation of all forms is where the greatest opportunity
lies.”
Emphasis is Phil’s, but of course I agree. Disappointingly, nobody took me on about
that bold claim I made (I was looking forward to a spirited debate). But I always like to
back the outsiders in a horse race. So I’m sticking with my prediction that a ‘Publisher Services’ company
will become a big platform player within a couple of years.
