On August 6 2013 the World Wide Web will celebrate its 22nd birthday. Think about that for a second. The World Wide Web is younger than 98% of people reading this story. This February Facebook celebrates its 9th birthday. LinkedIn turns 10 in May. Twitter is 6. AirBnB and Dropbox are both 4 yours old. The estimated value of Dropbox is $3.5 billion and for AirBnB it is $2 billion.
Not too long ago I had an intern who asked me ‘Do you think there is still room for revolutionary innovation on the web? I mean, isn’t everything invented already?’ I reminded me of that infamous quote by Charles H. Duell (Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899) “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Back in 1999 or 2000 when I first heard of Google, and gave it a try, I was very impressed. Not with their website (which looked awful) or their technology (sure, they were faster but HotBot and AltaVista worked fine too) but with the audacity of their ambition. They were competing with Yahoo!, which was then a multi billion dollar company with thousands of employees. Here was a tiny startup run by two PhD students at Stanford University. I didn’t think they had a chance.
Innovation always comes from an unexpected source. Look at Google. They don’t fear competition from Microsoft, which is trying to compete in Search with Bing, but from Facebook. Facebook makes search irrelevant for a lot of people. Once upon a time if you were bored you would go to Google and type in ‘funny homepages’. Now, you don’t have time to get bored because you are busy commenting and liking on Facebook.
The cost of competing is still going down. Amazon has just lowered their costs for hosting with another 25%. In 1997 when you wanted to launch a website you had to invest about a million to get there. These days all it takes is a basic knowledge of PHP, a few open source solutions and a long weekend to hack the whole thing together. And if it becomes popular overnight you can scale it endlessly via the Cloud.
Isn’t it logical that we will see innovation speed up, expand and become even more disruptive? With the barrier to entry getting lower and lower, what is stopping new ideas from entering the market? It is clear to me that the Web as we know it is only just picking up steam. It is a terribly exciting market to be in.
We have seen some amazing companies grow up and reach their teens this past decade. Some shining examples of how simple ideas can have tremendous impact. I promise you however that although we’ve seen a lot of amazing things, we are just getting started.
You think you’ve seen the sun, but you ain’t seen it shine. The best is yet to come. Indeed, it is.
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