For more than a year now we are living in a web 2.0 marketing hype. No matter the product, now everybody is adding the web 2.0 at the product’s name or description.
I was thinking what makes a product to be considered part of the web 2.0 trend and what comes to my mind most of the time is collaboration between people. This is the main feature of web 2.0 . Then automatically the next question that needs an answer would be: what is the smallest number of people needed, for the product to start creating value. You know I was watching Brainiacs on Discovery a while ago and they had an experiment regarding how many people are needed, and how they need to be placed around a stadium to be able to start a mexican wave. I think you got the ideea what I am talking about here.
Next thing that came to my mind was privacy. The biggest problem that a person or a business has with web 2.0 is the fact that personal (business) data is stored on someone else server. No matter how good the privacy policy is, I won’t be happy with the fact that I have data stored on a computer which is not mine. For the record I do use gmail 
and other web 2.0 sites.
Last thing that is coming to my mind is scalability. I think is the biggest technical problem for the web 2.0 providers. I am sure is very difficult to properly design an application that needs to support millions of people simultaneously.
Now think about the pizza box that google is selling for the small, medium companies.
Take the pizza box, remove the search engine and install something similar with del.icio.us, writely, google spreadsheets, google notebook, gliffy, gmail, 30boxes (google calendar), meebo, and some project management application like the one from 37signals.
Put everything on the same interface. Give a flat price for 50-250 users license, maybe add an yearly fee. Bundle a special version of Firefox, which will have all the tabs predefined with these apps, and you just removed from the equation the operating system and the monopoly associated with it. Also you just removed the dependency from adsense which is starting to become a weak point due to fraud allegations.
I am sure google or if not google another web startup is working on this kind of product for at least 3-6 months now. And I am pretty sure we are going to have something on the market, most probably from google before year’s end. Probably around the same time Vista will launch.
Waiting for feedback.
Update: Zimbra just announced Zimbra 4.0 which will add word, excel like capability the suite. Pretty neat.
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