Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a big special feature for The Industry Standard, entitled 10 'Net services that will succeed, and 10 that will probably fail. There are about 50 pieces of content in all, including slides, profiles, and predictions from the Standard's prediction market, and it required a tremendous amount of work to put together, including the writers and some behind-the-scenes folks who handled the design and programming preparations. But writing the introduction to this special feature gave me a chance to reflect on what lessons we've learned from the last 'Net bubble, back in the late 1990s:
Twitter, Joost, and some of the other names on the list of probable failures will no doubt come as a surprise to many readers. But if we learned anything in the last 'Net bubble, it is this: Positive buzz, gold-star VC backing, breathless acquisition chatter and a solid base of registered members are not guarantees of success. Press hype and 'Net buzz have a way of turning nasty. Investors can cut off funding, or steer entrepreneurs down the wrong path. Acquisitions can be mismanaged, or left to wither and die. Revenue might fail to reach a critical mass. The public decides to switch its attention to the Next Cool Thing.Most of the profiles were written by two contributors, Bill Snyder and Kristen Nicole, but I co-wrote the Second Life profile, which was grouped with the other "fails" (see Second Life: Interface, infrastructure and growth woes continue). Long-term readers of this blog and The Digital Media Machine will be recognize many of the complaints that were raised in The Standard -- bad UI, infrastructure problems, marketing hype, etc. In the positive camp, I was able to learn about some very impressive technologies in the 3D arena that I hadn't seen before -- check out the profiles for Modiface and SceneCaster.
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