The End of the World Wide Web as We Know It
Web 2.0 changed everything. With greater ease, more attractive pricing, and higher quality than ever, consumers became equipped to produce their own content. The digitization of everything from cameras to cost-effective storage made every user a potential cinematographer, paparazzo, or artist. Further, always-on broadband networks delivering speeds once reserved for the enterprise power user and available at mass-market pricing fanned the flames of growth. For the first time, consumers were given a voice. And that voice would be heard. Without making professionally generated media extinct, usergenerated content created a new forum of expression. Blogging, podcasting, social networking, texting, and crowdcasting all changed the landscape from a one-way communication aimed at the masses to a two-way conversation of millions. The proliferation of content produced and consumed would spawn a new generation of bandwidth-insatiable “Millennials,” who would literally grow up in this online, immersive world.
This book seeks to understand the new business models enabled through a 2.0 world, where the consumer remains in control of his experience, a developer community benefits from enhanced capabilities, and service providers monetize their investments to fuel future innovation. It does so with a scientific approach, based on extensive research commissioned by Alcatel-Lucent and conducted by Penn Schoen Berland, across thousands of consumers, enterprises, commercial developers, and advertisers to assess their unique worldview and willingness to pay for smart network capabilities as they look through the 2.0 lens. Further, since research provides directional and strategic insights, but can be more limited in precisely predicting the future, we will incorporate market examples that lend additional support.
