Too Cool for Web Too
There is no room for cynics in Web2.0
I was in a board room at the start of the first dot com boom, watching Price Waterhouse Coopers put on a Web1.0 face with a few ragged-headed , brash, linguistically-challenged yoots that “got” the Internet. The truth I determined during that meeting, is that the only thing they “had” over us was vast time-invested-experience *designing* web interfaces. They had orders of magnitude more experience than we did in Photoshop and HotDogPro. They knew HTML codes and javascript far beyond our levels. I figured they had done “home pages” day and night for months, while our staff had merely coded the things we actually needed. Our stuff worked but needed polish. There stuff was polished, but most of it didn’t really do much for anyone. Seriously, when it came to dancing bears and shoveling construction workers, these kids could code. Can you guess which the board thought was “better”?
Gotcha. The board sided with me. BUT, that was mostly because they were too skittish for the Internet itself. I got the impression they liked the ideas presented, but were cautious of controlling it like they were used to controlling just about everything else about their industry.
Enter Web2.0. I just watched a brief video of 2 guys in a Van touring “the valley” to promote their web site. Knowing the source of the video, I have to believe the poor quality of the video/audio was planned. But the words of the “two guys” brought me back to the boardroom. You know, the commercial about the board meeting where the stuffed suits glaze over during the presentation, but go wild when the kid says “oh, and we have a website“? Same deal. These two guys have a website. It’s a social web app (surprise surprise). It has cool features, like a calendar. Yup. And messaging. And stuff. And a van. Did we mention the van? Kewl.
There is no room for cynics in Web2.0. They just get in the way. Rock on doods.
Disclaimer: I am not old, I am a mere 43 years old. I spent a ton of years in grad school, so I am even less mature than my years suggest. But given that much of my generation has failed to take a leadership poisiton in anything, I find myself either too old for the 30 somethings, or too young for the ranks of the aging patriarchal defenders of our glorious military-industrial economy. I think it’s silly to pretend to be young, so I’ll be honest and not-play-young, which seems to make me look old. To me, California “Valley Girls” are from San Fernando Valley, not BlogHer. The cool Volkswagon vans are the Westfalia Eurovans, not the 1960’s “mini Buses”. Yeah, that’s me in the middle. Oh, and don’t call me “dude”.
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