Zeichick's Take: Ray Lane's Six Webs

By Alan Zeichick

May 3, 2007 — (Page 1 of 2)
If you thought that the confusion between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 was confusing, what about six Webs? That's how many that Ray Lane suggested during his talk at "The New Software Industry: Forces at Play, Business in Motion," a conference hosted by Carnegie Mellon West and the University of California, Berkeley, earlier this week.

Lane, who's currently a managing partner at super venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is probably better known as the president and COO of Oracle during most of the 1990s. While he's not known as an Internet guru, Lane is definitely one of the more profound thinkers in our industry, and has a track record to prove it.

Lane's premise, during his talk, is that huge enterprise applications (including those sold by Oracle and competitors like SAP) are going to give way to Web-based services that provide personal productivity to workers. Employees at all levels of a business benefit from software when it helps them get information fast, and make decisions fast.

The technology used to implement those decisions doesn't really matter—nor does it matter if the technology is running on in-house servers or on external services. It doesn't matter if the software is free or expensive. At the end of the day, it's all about productivity. As the Web morphs from the read-only Web 1.0 to the read/write Web 2.0 to the self-directed Web 3.0, the balance is going to shift toward Web applications, instead of enterprise applications. (That's my interpretation of his comments, by the way—Lane wasn't that explicit.)

Given the importance and evolution of Web-based technologies and services, Lane says, it's essential to bear in mind that there are six different Webs. Each one has its own software, its own use cases, its own industry leaders and its own evolutionary trajectory. So, when you're talking about using the Web, or leveraging the Web, don't just think Web 1.0 or Web 2.0. Think about these categories:

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