Phil Wainewright wrote an excellent post recently entitled The great Web 2.0 application (s)mash-up. He starts by quoting Mohan Sawhney, professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management:
“Five years from now, the concept of an application will be obsolete,” Sawhney said. “They will all be services, combined, mixed, matched and reused as needed.”
Phil goes on to discuss the merits or otherwise of the various “services” vendors lining up to be the dominant platforms and marketplaces in Web 2.0. Note that he particularly focuses on Enterprise markets, whereas my interest is more in the consumer/media markets. But there are crossovers – e.g. Amazon, which has been very quiet this year compared to the other big Net companies, has filed a patent for a web services marketplace (it was filed last year). Phil doesn’t sound convinced – yet – that any of Amazon, Google, eBay, Microsoft or Yahoo will necessarily lead the services ecosystem.
He then quotes my post a couple of weeks ago about a ‘Publisher Services’ company being a dark horse in all this:
“Finally, there are the left-field players, many of them as yet unknown or not considered as potential platforms. As Richard MacManus recently wrote, “Publisher Services has a lot of potential and it may well be the category which delivers the next Google.” He was writing specifically about RSS, but the notion applies equally well to all on-demand services, not merely RSS. In the Web 2.0 economy, service publishing and aggregation of all forms is where the greatest opportunity lies.”
Emphasis is Phil’s, but of course I agree. Disappointingly, nobody took me on about that bold claim I made (I was looking forward to a spirited debate). But I always like to back the outsiders in a horse race. So I’m sticking with my prediction that a ‘Publisher Services’ company will become a big platform player within a couple of years.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)