It’s All About the Widget
Rajil Kapoor, a VC at Mayfield Fund, he gets it. It’s always nice to read someone else writing your thoughts exactly. I’ve been banging on this theme for two years now, here’s my theory in Rajil’s words:
The web is evolving fast from a simple web page/website destination model to one of distributed data (which is synonymous with content) and applications that appear wherever the user needs them the most.
This may seem like a simple shift but the effects on the ecosystem are profound and new winners will be created.
Sure, you have to have a destination - but in many cases its becoming a showcase site vs where the real action is.
The extreme examples are widget businesses
Why is this happening? Very simply, because the user is pulling the web in this direction.
A website is really nothing more than data and applications on a page so it makes sense that a publisher puts some structure around these items, makes them discrete, and “atomizes”/redistributes it everywhere.
Get that last line. I’ve been pointing out for a while that a web site is little more than a bunch of widgets thrown together under the control of the publisher. Blow it all up, throw it to the winds and let the great unwashed public decide where the parts should logically land. Brilliant. But although Mayfield can feel chuffed to have investments in this space, we’re only now seeing the start of it. It’s such a massive paradigm shift that it will take ten years to play out. Today’s winners will probably be burned up in the supernova of distributed content we’ll see during that time as we refine our tools and learn to live with a web without our large reference websites.
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