I spent most of yesterday afternoon on the Web 2.0 Expo floor. If the ‘Web 2.0’ moniker ever made any sense (and that has been amply debated), it certainly no longer does. Most of the companies present on the show floor are essentially traditional software or service businesses. By that I don’t mean that they sell stuff on a CD that you install on your desktop or server. But if you look inside they have a well worn structure including marketing and sales and support and so on. The only meaningful difference to a few years ago is that almost everyone charges on the basis of some kind of usage metric. So maybe this should simply be the Web Expo. The other big impression is that cloud computing is making great progress. The few hosting companies that were at the show had essentially empty booths while the folks who promise some form of hosted apps without having to worry about machines (or even DB software) had a fair bit of traffic. It was very educational to see the many different approaches companies are taking ranging from requiring new development in a proprietary language to claimed drop in of existing LAMP stack apps. I look forward to participating more actively as the Expo comes to New York in the fall.
