Lots of excellent commentary on Web 2.0 business plans. I’m just going to post the links here — it’s all worth reading!
Web 2.0 day three: Silly business ideas
Web 2.0: Land of Opportunity, or Land of Absurdity?
Flock and Web 2.0: The Leaning Tower of Buzz — the title here is pure genius, BTW. There’s an excellent comment by Mr. Flock himself, Bart Decrem, responds about Flock’s business plan halfway down the page.
What Bubble 2.0? Try Babble 2.0 — some more Flock bashing, this time from 37signals folks, which is surprising!
What Is Web 2.0 — gotta listen to Tim. He’s got some interesting comparisons of Web 2.0 / not-Web-2.0 business models.
And last, but certainly not least, Paul Graham:
What Business Can Learn from Open Source
Those three aren’t focussed directly on Web 2.0, but they all reflect on lessons learned from the Y Combinator experiment, so most of the text is applicable. Paul has often made the point that the barrier to entry is much lower for startups now that they don’t have to worry about things like distribution channels (the web) and marketing (word of mouth, blogs, etc.), and that using powerful languages such as Lisp and Python (he seems to have learned to appreciate Ruby now too…) will yield the innovative efficiencies startups need to defeat their larger, more established competitors. I agree with this for the most part, but I think Paul is underestimating the disbalance Google has created. The point has been made that Google is making life difficult for startups. Not only are they doing great work on interesting products themselves (and encouraging their employees to use up to 10% of their time to work on their own projects), they’ve also shown a willingness to ruthlessly step in on someone else’s turf. A side effect of this is that startups aim to be bought out by Google/Yahoo!/Amazon, rather than seeking to displace them.
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