LeWeb: Social Thunderstorms

George Colony, Chairman & CEO, Forrester Research
“Three Social Thunderstorms”

1: The Death of the Web
Processing power doubles, Moore’s Law, every 18 months. Will be there for next 10 years or so. Next, Hitachi Law, doubling of storage every 12 months about. Then the network. It is improving, not at the same speed as the others. So if you were to build architecture based on network, you would be wasting all the other stuff. Thinking about trends over the longterm, the centre is becoming more powerful, and the periphery is becoming more powerful to. So datacentres and the devices. So the iPad2 is equivalent to 1986 Cray 2. in 1992 it was one of the 30 fastest in world. So what will we have in 5 years? Some of the old architects are dead. The PC..does not leverage the cloud. Everything in cloud? Then have to run through network, so that causes issues. So is the app internet the model to go for? Powerful things in cloud, plus powerful devices. Share between them. Been driven not just by technology. Users like apps, they are simpler, faster etc. Gives a better experience. This is app to internet, not the web.

3 companies emerging in app internet systems. Apple (although may have an overcharge system). Google, with Android. Third he sees as Amazon

2. Social Saturation
Do lot of research. Finds that social is running out of hours and people. From US research, they are using social more than they are volunteering, being religious, more than phone/email/post and more than exercising. Only a little less than childcare and shopping. They are running out of hours. With people, in US/EU, 80% in EU, 86% in US are social. Asia btw 70=90%, emerging world (in urban centres) mid-high 90%s.

So we’re in a bubble. If you need more time, users, then in trouble, If it is timewasting. Moving to a post social world, like web in year 2000. Lots will not survive. believes next wave will be faster,more efficient, more value per hour used. So post social players will dominate.

3. Enterprise
72% of large corps are implementing social or are interested. It’s about the customer, better cust interactions, service, then only internal use. Beyond Sharepoint, there are massive opportunities in social. So Salesforce, IBM, a far better Sharepoint, all possibilities. Think though will see new players. We’ll get rich professional services opps, and a major test of marketing and biz tech collaboration