Considérant la récente participation de Microsoft dans Facebook, est ce que l’on peut anticiper un parallèle entre le crack économique des dotcoms en 2000 et le Web 2.0 ?

On 24 October 2007, Microsoft has announced an investment of $240 million for 1.6% equity stake of Facebook, the No. 2 social networking site, valuing the company at a whopping $15 billion. With this deal, Microsoft will have a control over the placement of banner ads on Facebook outside the U.S., where about 60% of Facebook’s active users reside. While for Fackebook, Owen Van Natta, its vice president of operations and chief revenue officer also expressed an optimism in a statement, “We are pleased to take our Microsoft partnership to the next level, we think this expanded relationship will allow Facebook to continue to innovate and grow as a technology leader and major player in social computing, as well as bring relevant advertising to the more than 49 million active users of Facebook.”

Facing the acquisition of Youtube by Google, the Facebook’s transaction with Microsoft and numerous newly emerging sites dedicated to online video, online advertisement etc, someone amaze at the creative power of Web2.0 while someone can’t help expressing an anxiety for the recurrence of the “dotcom crash” in 2000.

The columnist John C. Dvorak has published the article «Bubble 2.0 coming soon» at the beginning of the year, in which the author gave critics on nearly all the new conceptions that he regarded as “ideas floating the new bubble”: the Neo-social networking, Video mania, User-generated content, Mobile everything, Ad-leveraged search, Widgets and toolbars. According to him, this time the entire fanaticism in the virtual world is even worse than the predecessors.

However, according to Tim O’Reilly, “Bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.” He has also posted a meme map of Web 2.0, which visualizes a set of principles and embodies the real vitality of Web 2.0.

And according to Dion Hinchcliffe, Web 2.0 is a truly egalitarian force which can trigger the network effects, say the core description of which is “when a good or service has more value the more that other people have it too.” Though not clear from this description is the raw power that is caught up in and represented by network effects, it can be seen from the following chart that at even an early point, the cumulative value of a large number of connected users goes exponentially. This may also explain why the great giants on the Internet still keep to form alliance and to expand their users’ scope.

Certainly, in spite of the core competence and the network effects, how to make use of them to gain the real profit is still the crux of Web 2.0. The key to this problem, according to Huang Shaolin, is the new business strategy in the context of Web 2.0, where the market and information monopolization has disintegrated. He also referred the Google’s distributed online advertising model, which totally broke up the traditional advertisers’ conception, and made a good use of the great online traffic (even not via Google itself) and the up-to-date technologies.

So personally speaking, due to the above discussion I don’t think the “dotcom crash” will reappear for Web 2.0, but we should also recognize that the excessive fanaticism or too high expectation on Internet is destructive for the industry. By getting rid of the speculativeness and exploiting the new business model motivated by the high technology, we can expect a continuous development and prosperity of the industry.

Reference:
http://www.news.com/the-social/8301-13577_3-9803872-36.html
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2164136,00.asp
http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/web_20s_real_secret_sauce_network_effects.htm
http://www.digitalwall.com/scripts/display.asp?UID=345