Waiting for the World to End

I spent all afternoon at Eslite, a Taipei book shop that's Amazon-ized itself into a 7-story department store. I ate Korean food, tried on shoes and bought the latest issue of Business Next (imagine Wired crossed with Business 2.0 and written in Chinese).

My Chinese is rusty: so far I've only struggled through three articles:

1. Ying-hsun Wang (we are not related), a Dan Jiang University professor, argues that Google has a strong brand because its products are widely used - not the other way around. He's sure that your initial exposure to Google wasn't through any kind of advertising or promotional campaign. In fact, he doubts you remember coming across any ad for Google, ever.

2. Writer and researcher Wenchen Pang thinks that Web 2.0 ain't no bubble. BusinessWeek's recent cover story on Digg was instantly blogged by 350+ readers; this shows that Web 2.0-style interactivity has become a way of life, which is a more important fact that any particular site's success or failure.

3. My favorite is Shanghai-based reporter John Wang's (I am not related to him either) recap of an acquaintance's career. The unnamed young exec used to be a fearless entrepreneurial type who leapt from one early-stage startup to another. He had a keen eye for cool new technologies and wasted no time worrying about job security. But through an acquisition he ended up with a comfortable position at an large public company, where his sense of adventure began to slip away. Now he's nothing but an anxious middle man who's in constant fear of getting axed in the next round of layoffs.

According to Wang, corner-office routines are far more dangerous than basement brainstorming sessions. The more someone takes stability for granted, the less equipped he is to handle new risks and opportunities.

His story feels almost like a parable for the web hosting market. Ten years ago, the industry was new and exciting; now it's all grown up. And everyone is clinging sooo tightly onto proven business models that innovations are few and far between. There's no end of depressing headlines on the Web Hosting Industry Review: Intermedia more than doubles storage space at no additional cost! AIT slashes prices by 40%! Unfortunately, the more preoccupied current providers are with maintaining the status quo, the less equipped the industry will be to deliver that next big thing end users are looking for.

Comments

[Bert Armijo]

I love the travel log. It's been a long time since I was in Asia and it's refreshing my memory.

I've been through the small company to big company transition a few times in the last 25 years. Twice because of acquisitions and more than a couple times because a startup failed and I needed to rebuild my credit rating in order to work for peanuts again.

What I find in retrospect, is that I've never left the big company per se, but instead have been chasing an idea. I get hooked on a particular concept and if I can't push it forward fast enough in the large enterprise I leave to join a startup and focus on it.

[Isabel Wang]

Bert - I'm guessing that 3tera will have a presence in Asia in no time! I picked up a bunch of Chinese language tech magazines in Taipei, and I'm getting the impression that every successful Asian Web 2.0 site is having difficulty scaling its infrastructure. They should all be running on AppLogic grids :)