we want it free!! (or at least cheaper)

As explained in the Paul Graham article about Web 2.0, in order to be considered part of the next generation of websites (or web 2.0), the sites need to be democratic and free. MySpace, wikipedia, craigslist, and digg.com are mentioned in the article. Clearly facebook would fall into this category as well. Google would count as well. Of course if gmail counts, then why wouldn't hotmail count, they have offered free email for years. Yahoo has too. Yahoo's sites are free and you can create a Yahoo homepage which is customizable as well. Ebay lets you search their site without registering, although you have to pay ebay to sell things.

One industry highlighted in the textbook is the music industry. In the past, only a few artists would get signed, and if one of their albums sold, they would get $1 an album and after the record company, the distributor and the retailer got their cut, the customer would pay $16 an album! Now, more artists get signed, the artists get $3 for each album they sell and the customer only has to pay $10 for an album! This is clearly progress, as the major artists who would have gotten signed anyway are getting 3 times as much, the minor artists are getting distributed (and paid) and the customer is getting access to more music choices at a lower price.

In the Paul Graham article, he calls itunes like web 1.5 because while a lot of music is available, it is not free. I thought of napster when I read this article. With napster, there was even more music available than is available on itunes and it was free. But, since the artists weren't getting paid at all, and this was considered theft of intellectual property and shut down, it may not be fair to use napster as a counter-argument to the idea that we are moving towards web 2.0. However, I would point out that most new songs on itunes cost $1.29 now, not $0.99, so they are moving in the wrong direction in terms of progressing towards web 2.0.

Paul Graham predicted in the article that someone would come out with web-based Microsoft Office platforms and make them available for free. As you probably know, this has happened as Google unveiled their Google Documents a few years ago. To counter Google, Microsoft has announced that they will come out with a web based version of their own Office products. This is clearly a blow to Microsoft's profits that they have been forced to do this and further evidence to Graham's point that web 2.0 is here. Here is a link to Clark Howard's website and an article about the new web-based MS office that is coming out: http://clarkhoward.com/liveweb/shownotes/2009/07/14/16208/

He also says that we will all be able to get broadband access for around $10 a month next year. I hope he's right!!