I certainly don’t want to be the lone man who calls widgets as bullshit, after all, widgets have become de rigueur with Web 2.0 (now that I can call BS). But let’s take it from someone far smarter and accomplished than me:
While there might be room for one or two “widget management systems”, there certainly isn’t the need for 23 of them. In addition, the ability to actually build a real business based on a packaging and distribution system around the application container widget is unclear to me. So: widget=big; widget-derivative-business=probably-bullshit.
Last year, the YouTube clones were overfunded: 200 companies with nowhere to go this year and nothing to show but expensive bandwidth fees. This year original content is in demand, with reason. Of course, I’m biased.
This year, it’s the attack of the widget clones.
I told you, we’re not in a bubble, but we’ll experience a pocket bubbles each and every year, and it’s widget-time.
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March 6th, 2007 at 8:41 am
The game of “follow the leader” is not a particularly fulfilling one with regard to VC backed companies. There is an old cliche that the market leader wins, #2 does ok, #3 is largely irrelevant, and everyone is completely irrelevant. For whatever reason, this cliche isn’t particularly persistent so this pattern repeats itself over and over and over again.
March 6th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Google buying YouTube made that even more poignant, and Guba’s CEO admitted it in a rather very candid remark. Look at Metacafe’s difficulty in selling as well. YouTube has its problems now (more to do with being suddenly uncool and part of Google’s empire), and there is certainly room for new players and another contestant to do ok (like you say Brad), but ultimately there won’t be billion dollar exits for VCs in this exit, so that is why all of the YouTube-category websites are now looking to go legit and generate revenues from ads, instead of hoping for the hail mary exit in the form of an M&A. At the risk of tooting our own horn, we are seeing this day in day out when file sharing sites X, Y and Z who did not return our calls last year want to wine and dine us (WatchMojo.com) at now to get our video content and monetize it on a revenune share basis on their site. What changed? We didn’t. The market did. Thank God!
But I just do not understand the VC mentality: the same quantity of me-too companies that sprung during the B2B craze was duplicated during the video file sharing craze, the social networking craze, the online video marketplace wave, and now we’re seeing widget mania. The funniest part of it all, “we’re not a me-too kind of company,” sayeth the VC. I do not wish to paint all VCs with one brush, but man, if it walks like a duck and…