The True Nature of Web 2.0

In Network World this week there's an article titled "IBM's fight over Web 2.0 will dwarf past clashes against Microsoft". The proverbial bottom line of this article is that IBM is going to flood the market with advanced products and services based on Web 2.0 technologies and then beat us to death with a marketing tsunami that will rock the worlds of Microsoft, Cisco, and everyone else who stands in their path to world domination.

We've seen IBM re-invent themselves several times and there's a lot of evidence that they can do the same thing in the Web 2.0 world ... at least on the products and services side. But is that what Web 2.0 really is?

I've been pondering the Web 2.0 market and while there are all sorts of standards, products, and services that you can point to as being typical of Web 2.0-type "stuff" what really stands out as the big emergent property of this market can be summed up by one word: "mashup."

The greatest generator of mashups so far has been Google with the whole universe of "mashapps" that rely on Google Maps. From Trulia to Twitter Google Maps have transformed the use of mapping. And that's just a single service in a universe of mashable Web service APIs!

The true nature of Web 2.0 is collaborative business processes that integrate to create hyper-applications. Different vendors providing services based on their core expertise that are mashed with other services from other expert service providers to create applications that benefit from the knowledge of legions of experts not from just one small pool of programmers.

The real test of IBM's products and services will be how nicely they can play with other service providers and product developers. If IBM does get this aspect of their Web 2.0 strategy in place and working they could indeed dominate the market. Microsoft, Cisco: Are you ready to play too?

• Cisco
• collaboration
• Google
• IBM
• marketing
• mashup
• mashups
• Microsoft
• Web 2.0