Media Saturation and Software
As consumer software converges into media I think innovation will stagnate. If the game truely is to only grab ad share what will become of the future?
Will there be an entire economy based on the buying and selling of ads and nothing more? Is that even desriable or sustainable?
The market will shift from dollars for software to attention for features. They say the market value of a product is what someone is willing to pay for it. What happens when anything above $0 cannot compete? Problem is: attention is not always a good metric for valuing a software product. I can’t help but think that eventually the risk to developing an innovative piece of software will outweigh the low cost, low risk task of creating yet-another-piece-of-social-entertainment.
Maybe Web 2.0 should have been the opening scene of Idiocracy…