The term Web 2.0 means many things to many people. It has been defined and redefined, refuted, and debated. It cropped up after the dot-com bubble burst, and was put forward as a shorthand term to encompass all the new ways we use the Web. Now, the term Web 2.0 is used in a context much greater than just technology - from new ways of developing websites, new kinds of business models, new applications or platforms for applications, new kinds of users, to totally new kinds of companies. Some people don't even believe there is such a thing as Web 2.0. Giles Gravier says “I prefer to think that the Web has no version number. It's a constantly evolving entity, and there will never be clearly defined thresholds that we will reasonably be able to label as 1.0, 2.0, 3.0.″ You can read more here.
I'm often asked what Web 2.0 means to Sun Microsystems, a company that has been driving the vision of network computing throughout its history. Within our company, I think that Web 2 can be used in four different contexts:
- A set of horizontal web technologies that impact all our customers as they increase the component of their business done on the Internet and harness the power of communities.
- New, open development processes that are radically collapsing the 'n degrees of separation' that historically isolated engineers/developers from customers/users, resulting in a new interactive and iterative development model with shorter time-to-market.
- An enabler of improved communication, collaboration and innovation among communities with similar interests, such as customers and employees, using the Internet as a vehicle. Popular Sun Microsystems blogger and Director of Web Technologies Tim Bray has said “The overwhelming characteristic of Web 2.0 is the culture of contribution.″ Tim's blog can be found here.
- A new set of customers with members such as new media companies, providers of Internet services, online gaming organizations, social utilities, online marketing and advertising platforms, and e-Commerce sites.
This Blog will be centered around Web 2.0 in the context of these new customers.
Sun recently hosted a meeting to learn from these communities, and spent time listening to CTOs from a number of these Web-centric organizations. (See Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's Blog for a discussion of the insights we gained from these individuals.) Although the organizations were quite diverse, there was remarkable agreement about their key technology challenges, with confluence around these three critical issues:
- Accelerating time to market with open source. Taking advantage of the leaps of innovation possible with open source software solutions, bringing products to market quickly and benefitting from the work of other community members.
- Scaling their technology to accommodate massive growth. Being capable of surviving the 'TechCrunch Effect'. How do companies ensure that their architectures scale to meet the hyper growth that these new companies experience without over-investing in servers and bandwidth?
- Managing the complexity of that scale by improving datacenter efficiency. With massive growth, the issues of cost and future flexibility become important. Attention is needed to create a cost-effective infrastructure. Efficient systems management, lower power and cooling costs, and managing the datacenter footprint are of increasing urgency.
Although these issues are also important to traditional enterprises, Web 2.0 companies are addressing them very differently. Scaling is accomplished horizontally with systems that are cheap and easy to deploy. Quantity is quite often more important that quality. There is virtually complete reliance on open source software. Scripting languages are used more than traditional programming languages.
Sun has set a path for serving the needs of these diverse new customers, guided by our understanding of these three challenges and the new approaches needed to solve them for Web 2.0 companies.
