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“Early enthusiasts become evangelists,  and mix with fellow community members creating converts who, in their turn, continue the evangelizing and convert other members into activists or, at least, passive and uncritical supporters. Of course, each convert testifies  to the truth of validity  of the original proposition, meaning that the converted reinforce and re-enthuse  the original early enthusiasts (and each other). Social dynamic dynamics of this type are easily able to elevate a conjecture or a bit of gossip into hard truth or an indisputable fact in the minds of community members. The outcome is likely to be a bubble of enthusiasm, one that may actually exaggerate the appeal of the new market out of all proportion.”

No, its not about RubyOnRails (or?) - the above quotation come from brilliant book “Fast Second - How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets”, which was shortlisted as finalist of Financial Times Book of the Year 2005.

The idea presented in this book is simple - smart companies are waiting for the new market to become dominated by so called “dominant design” - and decide to invest only when they recognize that particular market has stabilized, and both consumers/users and producers learned how to use/produce the technology everybody wants.  In short, its what Robert Murdoch was trying to do, when he bought MySpace, but unfortunately, from where we are now, it seems MySpace wasn’t so dominant design after all…

The above quotation, describes the early stage of new market colonization - when a new market see a vast amount of entrants, all of which believe that only their idea is the right one, and only their product will make hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem is, they are the only one who really believe so, and even worse - their ideas, although interesting and original, usually struggle to reach break-even point, and generate enough incomes to stay afloat. Nevertheless, precisely because the market is so new and so hot, there’s vast amount of cash available from various VCs and investors, who are willing to put it into even wildest ideas of the “new market entrants”, in order to be the first who find that holy grail of the new market - a “dominant design” which will eventually wipe out almost all of the competition, and grant them thousands of % of return.

By now, you probably guesses already I’m talking about web startups and the situation which we have in 2007. Tens of web startups are getting ridiculous financing in Series A, B or C investments. Hundreds or even thousands of others are desperately looking for their chance to “get a few millions of investments” as well. But the problem is - only a handful of those, really make any money. Within last 3 weeks, I spoke with several web startups looking for financing and the story was always the same “the idea is great, we need 2-3 years, and only then we will generate hundreds of millions - therefore what we need is couple of millions to stay afloat for those 2-3 years”.

Are you kidding me? WHERE IS THE MONEY? If it doesn’t make any money for 2-3 years, if it can’t reach break-even - what’s the point in investing?  Doesn’t it make much more sense to wait for the first dominant design to appear on the market, and invest only then - even if that would mean we get 10% not 80% of the company?

 ”Whatever the logic that channeled vast quantities of equity and venture capital into companies that showed no signs of generating revenues, it was eventually exposed for what it was.”

The above is from the same book - and no, its not about web startups scene in 2007. Its about Internet bubble of end of 1990s. If you remember those days, honestly, do you recognize any similarity between then and now?

… no no, not facebook! Who cares about facebook when there’s so much stuff outside of it! Google, Yahoo, Flickr, your personal blog (if you have any of course) - you name it!

So despite everyone around being more and more bound to facebook, and touting it as the “next web platform, the one and only website we need” - sorry guys, I’m not buying it. However big, facebook is just that - a website. Sure you can meet lot of friends there, make great connections and build facebook apps - but thats still a closed platform - facebook’s platform. You can’t do everything you want there, you can do just what they allow  you to.  It was always like this - and it will remain this way. Not just on facebook, but everywhere - on every single web site out there (counting google too of course).

So what could be the true next web OS platform? Well, not a website of course. A browser. Or more precisely - a browser’s standard (though, one thing I’m sure is that there will never be just one standardized browser).

In his recent post about standardization  of Ajax UI in the future, Joel (the one from the software ) proposed a very interesting idea of some piece of the code, so called “NewSDK” getting catched in the browser:

“But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast.”

All the above is very interesting of course, but hey, sky is the limit - why write only “Ajax NewSDK”? Why not complete webapp SDK. When your browser is no longer a browser but provides a complete SDK - it’s effectively becoming more than a browser - a programming platform on its own.

Imagine web widgets installed not on your facebook account, but on your browser (no, not just google-bars etc. I mean REAL applications installed on the browser) - connecting together not just your facebook friends but ALL your friends from all social networks. Imagine being able to select which SDK, which web standard you want to upload to your “browser-OS” and run natively (single sign-on anyone? Office 2.0 to stay?) - and which one you just don’t want to use anymore.

Imagine browser being your desktop, your place of work, your PC… whoow, say that again? Yup. The problem with Joel’s theory is that “caching SDK on my browser” means installing software on my computer. So if it really is going to happen, if we really are going to see browsers becoming new web platforms - then it means “Personal Computer getting personal again”.

But hey, thats not that bad. After all, we all loves our PCs. And despite all the “net is the new thing” stuff, everyone single person I know have their own PC at home. So I believe it will take a while before we really starts becoming so “free” to use “our documents anywhere we like”. PC is here to stay - its not longer the only elements of our home network, but still an important part. But the way we are using it - will change. Behold facebook and microsoft, for the power of Internet is not in PC vs. Web fight, but in connecting both world together and melting the border between then - the border which for most of us is our web browser.

The day when my next OS appears to be giant web browser with just some top-layers apps constantly caching streams of data from various websites out there is the final destiny for sure. But what’s the first step from where we are here to where we are suppose to be then? Build more browser/web apps. And FireFox/IE, please let those apps integrate better with user’s browsers. We are sooo tired of “helpful” browser plugins like google of yahoo-bar. We want full grown apps now. Its the next natural step. Let the browser be your platform.