UKNM: Fall Internet World/NY (long)

[Clay Shirky]

Every year, I attend Internet World in NY, and recently I've taken to

writing up my notes and circulating to the WWWAC list, a NY web

mailing list. While the business conditions for Internet work differ

between New York and Europe, I think a lot of themes are going to be

common to both sides of the Atlantic, so I include my observations

here.


-clay


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Just got back from Internet World in New York. My approach to Internet

World is always the same - skip the conference and the keynotes,

ignore most of the mega-installations, and go straight to the trade

floor, and then just walk every aisle and look (briefly) at every

booth. Today was several hundred booths, and took 5 hours.


I do this because it doesn't matter to me when one company thinks they

have a good idea, but when I see three companies with the same idea,

then I start to take notice. In addition, the floor of Internet World

is a good proxy for the marketplace: if a company can't make its

business proposition clear to the person passing by their booth, they

aren't going to be able to make it clear in the market either. (One

company had put up a single sign, announcing only that they were

"Using Advanced Technology to Create Customer-Driven Solutions."

Another said they were "The Entertainment Marketing Promotion

Organization.")


Herewith my impressions of the IW '99 zeitgeist:


* Product categories


- Any web site which seemed like a good idea in 1997 is now an entire

industry sector, with both copycat websites, and groups offering to

outsource the function for you. Free home pages, free email, vertical

search engines, etc etc etc.


- Customer service is the newest such category: the interest generated

in LivePerson has led to a number of similar services. Look for the

human element to re-enter the sales channel as a point of

differentiation in the next 12 months. 


- Filtering is also now a bona fide category. As if on cue, Xerox

fired 40 employees for inappropriate use of the net this week, with

slightly more than 20 of these people fired for looking at porn on the

job.  Filtering has left behind its "Big Brother/Religions

Conservative" connotations and become a business liability issue.


- Promotions/sweepstakes/turn-key affiliate programs are hot. Last year

was all about ecommerce - this year, the need to have viewers to extract

all those dollars from has loomed as an issue as well, so spending money

on tricks other than pure media buys to move traffic to your site has

gained as a category. 


- Embedded systems. Lots and lots of embedded systems. Since it takes

hardware longer to adjust than software, I don't know how fast this is

moving, but by 2001, all devices smarter than a pencil sharpener will

have a TCP/IP stack.


- Language translation is hot. The economic rationale of high-traffic,

ad-supported sites demands constant growth, but net growth in the States

is slowing from impossibly fast to merely fast, even as other parts of

the world hit the "annual doubling" part of their growth curve.  The

logical solution is prospecting for clients overseas - expect the rush

to Europe to accelerate in the next 12 months. 


- Quality Assurance is not hot, yet, but is has grown quite a bit from

last year. eBay outages, post-IPO scrutiny, and the general pressures of

scale and service are making people much more aware of QA issues, and

several companies were hawking their services in interface design, human

factors and stress testing. 


- Internet telephony is weakening as a category, as the phone-centric

view (lets route telephone conversations over the net) gives way to a

net-centric view (lets turn telephone conversations into digital

data). Many companies are integrating voice digitization into their

products, but instead of merely turning these into phone calls,

they're also letting the user store them, edit them, forward them as a

clickable link (think voicemail.yahoo.com) etc. Voice is going from

being an application to a data format.


* Application Service Providers (a.k.a. apps you log into)


- There is no such thing as an ASP. I went in looking for them,

expecting the show to be filled with them, and found almost none. It

only dawned on me after the fact that consumers buy products, not

categories, and that in fact there were three major ASP categories,

though they didn't call themselves that.  They were:


  - Document storage. There have been 'free net backup' utilities for

    years, but this year, with mp3 and the need to store jpegs somewhere

    besides your home computer (ahem), the "i-drive/freedrive/z-drive"

    concept is really taking off. 


  - Document management. Many companies are vying to offer the killer

    app that will untie the document from the desktop, with some

    combination of net backup/file versioning/format conversion/update

    notification/web download in a kind of webified LAN. This

    document-driven (as opposed to device-driven) computing represents

    both the biggest opportunity and the biggest threat for Microsoft,

    since it is the document formats and not the software that really

    drives their current hold on the desktop.  If MS can stand the

    pain of interoperating with non-MS devices, they could be the

    major stakeholder in this arena in two years time.


  - Conferencing/calendering. Personal computers are best used by

    persons, not groups. This category is an attempt to use the Web as

    a kind of GC, a "group computer", by taking what the net has

    always done best, communication within and between groups, into

    the center of the business world.


* The dogs that didn't bark in the night:


  - Very few companies selling pure XML products anymore - I counted

    2.  XML is on a lot of feature/compatibility lists, but makes up

    the core offering of few products.


  - Ditto Java. Lots of products that use Java; very few

    banners that said "Java Inside". 


  - Despite the large and growing impact of the net on gaming and

    vice-versa, there was almost no gaming presence there. Games are

    still a seperate industry, and they have their own show (E3) which

    runs on a different logic. (Games are one of the only software

    categories currently *not* challenged by a serious free software

    movement.)


  - Ditto movies. Only atomfilms was there. The Internet is everywhere,

    but movies are still in LA. 


  - Ditto music. .mp3's are not an Internet revolution - they're just

    another file format, after all. What they are is a music

    revolution, and the real action is with the people who own the

    content. Lots of people advertised .mp3 compatibility, but almost

    no one structured their product offering around them. Those

    battles will be fought elsewhere.


  - To my surprise, there were also few companies offering 3rd party

    solutions to warehousing/shipping. I expect this will become a big

    deal after we see what happens during the second ecommerce

    christmas.


* Random notes


- Its impossible to take any company seriously if they only have a kiosk

in a country pavilion or a "Partner Pavilion"-- they just end up looking

like arm candy for Oracle or Germany, not like real companies.


- That goes double if there are people in colorful native garb in the

booth. 


- The conference is more feminized than last year, which was alarmingly

like a car show. There were more women who knew what they were talking

about on either side of the podium, and fewer "booth babes" per capita.


- The conference is also darker-skinned than last year. There were

more blacks and latinos attending than presenting, but numbers on both

sides of the podium were up there as well.


- The search engine war has broken out into the open (viz. every

conversation in the past year by someone asking how to improve their

rankings.) There were companies advertising automated creation of

search-engine-only URLs to stuff the rankings. Look for the SE firms

to develop ways of filtering these within 6 months, probably using

router data.


- The big booth holders have moved from computing to networking. Two

years ago, Dell had a big presence, but the biggest booths now were the

usuals (IBM, MS, Oracle) and then the telcos - ATT, Qwest, GTE. 


- For years, IW had several PC manufacturers. This year, the number of

booths for companies who sell servers, power-supplies, etc., outnumbered

the companies who concentrate on PCs. Every company at IW that does ship

PCs will ship with Linux pre-installed - no MS-only hardware vendors

anymore. 


- Every company has a Linux port or a story about working on one. Unlike

last year, nobody says 'Huh?' or 'No.'


- Your next computer will have a flat screen. There were more flat

screens than glass monitors in the booths. 


- The marketing effect of changing the Macintosh case colors came

home; the iMac was the booth acoutrement of choice after the flat

panel. Furthermore, since almost no one writes software just for the

Mac anymore, having an iMac showing your product has become a visual

symbol for 'cross-platform'.


- The sound was unbearably loud at times - a perfect metaphor for the

increasingly noisy market. Two illustrative moments: a bona fide smart

person talking too quietly into a microphone, trying to explain how

XML really works, while the song "Fame" is drowning him out from the

next booth as accompaniement to a guy speed-finger-painting a giant

portrait on black velvet. Also, you could hardly hear what Intel was

up to because of the noise from the Microsoft pavilion, and

vice-versa.


- 2 different companies offered internet/stereo compatibility. Expect

convergence to merge home and car audio with the net before it merges

the computer with the TV.


- The only large crowd with that 'tell us more, tell us more' look in

their eyes were crowded around the Handspring booth. Handspring's

product, the Vizor, is nothing more that a Palm Pilot in a PVC case

with more apps and memory for fewer dollars -- its biggest selling

point in fact is how *little* it differs from the Pilot -- but to see

the crowd at the booth you'd have thought they were giving away hot

buttered money.



*whew*. Glad that's over til next year...


-clay 


-- 

Clay Shirky

Professor, New Media

Department of Film & Media

Hunter College

http://www.shirky.com/ 

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