Doc Searls Weblog

In The Web is on life support: Forrester Research, Marketwatch reports on a speech titled “Three Social Thunderstorms,” by Forrester CEO George Colony at LeWeb. Sourcing both the Marketwatch report and George’s slides, this appears to be what he said*…

Thunderstorm One is “The Death of the Web.” Marketwatch:

Colony said that several models of thinking about the Web/Internet space are dead or outmoded.

Colony distinguished between the Web, which he said is a software architecture, and the Internet, which is a larger organizing framework.

He said technology is migrating away from the PC/Desktop model, as well as what he called the Web cloud.

Thunderstorm Two is “Social Saturation.” George’s slide:

• Yes, we are in a bubble…for social startups
• We are moving to a post social (POSO) world
• POSO startups will dominate

Marketwatch again:

Colony asked LeWeb attendees to consider “what we will hold in our hands 5 years from now.”

Forrester Research thinks the answer to that question is the so-called App Internet, which offers a “faster, simpler and better Internet experience.”

The App Internet market is worth $2.2 billion, according to Forrester Research.

And decision makers at 41% of companies are now moving away from Web-based software toward the App Internet, Colony said…

He also said that adoption of social media in urban areas was now extremely high and “running out of hours and people.”

Declaring, in effect, that we are socially saturated.

That means “we are in a bubble,” he said, adding that a post-social world was on its way that would “sweep away some of the nonsense like Foursquare.

Thunderstorm Three is “Enterprise.” George’s summary slides:

What enterprise means

• Beyond Sharepoint…lies the next wave of social opportunity
• A rich and growing professional service market emerges
• A major test of marketing and BT collaboration

When the skies clear…

• A new social platform – App Internet
• New social players – POSO
• New social opportunities – Enterprise
• Social will thrive, but in an evolved form

Declaring things dead is always an attention-grabber, and George grabbed a lot with this one, as you can see from the links below. Forrester’s market (and George’s primary audience), however, is the enterprise. For that audience George is right to call for thinking beyond today’s Web and social strategies, and to develop app-based ones. But calling the Web dead along the way has the effect of a red herring, diverting attention away from real risks both to the Net and to the Web — risks that extend to enterprises as well, and that all of us (including Forrester) should also be caring about. More about those in my next post.

Meanwhile, here are Zemanta‘s related articles:

• Forrester: Enterprise Social Software to Become a $6.4 Billion Market in 2016 (pcworld.com)
• Get Ready For Forrester’s Social Thunderstorms (blogs.wsj.com)
• Social networking’s salad days are ending, Forrester says (news.cnet.com)
• Forrester CEO: “Nonsense” Like Foursquare Will Soon be Replaced With More Efficient Social Apps (siliconfilter.com)
• LeWeb in an uncertain Europe offered a good reminder that bubbles burst (venturebeat.com)
• Forrester: Enterprise social software to become a $6.4 billion market in 2016 (infoworld.com)
• Social networking’s salad days are ending, Forrester says (news.cnet.com)
• Forrester: Enterprise social barely out of the starting gate (gigaom.com)

* Fred Wilson has since put up Sunday Debate: Is Social Peaking?, which includes George’s full speech. Watch it and compare with what I was able to glean above from the Marketwatch report and George’s slides, which were all I had to go by at the time. That alone is a lesson in the insufficiencies of all sources other than one’s own direct witness.

Now let’s look at what George says abut the “death of the Web,” and about the larger topic of “the network.”

Starting at 3:10 George says “Yes, the network is improving in power, but not at the same speed as processing and storage.” And, “If you had to build an architecture based only around the network — move all your bits to the network — you would be wasting over time all this extraordinary processing power and storage.” As an example of how the network is moving slowly, he cites the slow uptake of 4G mobile data in Europe. Other nuggets:

• The periphery of the network is becoming ever more intelligent.” (that is, “what we hold in our hands” e.g. the iPad.)
• (I’ll add more when I have time. Other stuff has jumped in the way.)

What matters here is the reason why the network is growing slower than either processing or storage: because it’s trapped inside what Bob Frankston calls The Regulatorium, which is the collusive space co-occupied by the phone and cable operators and their regulatory captives. While we might be impressed that our downstream speeds from Comcast have gone from 3Mbps to 50Mbps, that progress masks the limits that all the carriers put on forward Internet growth, and connectivity in general. For more on that, go to my next post, Broadband vs. Internet.