I try to avoid posting about TechMeme pile ups but this one was just too irritating to let pass. Mark Cuban has a blog post entitled The Internet is Dead and Boring which contains the following excerpts
Some of you may not want to admit it, but that's exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago. ... Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet is evolving. Actually it is the exact opposite. Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet has stopped evolving and stabilized as a platform. Its very very difficult to develop applications on a platform that is ever changing. Things stop working in that environment. Internet 1.0 wasn't the most stable development environment. To days Internet is stable specifically because its now boring.(easy to avoid browser and script differences excluded) Applications like Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, etc were able to explode in popularity because they worked. No one had to worry about their ISP making a change and things not working. The days of walled gardens like AOL, Prodigy and others were gone. ... The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today. ... So, let me repeat, The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead for the foreseeable future..
Some of you may not want to admit it, but that's exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago. ... Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet is evolving. Actually it is the exact opposite. Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet has stopped evolving and stabilized as a platform. Its very very difficult to develop applications on a platform that is ever changing. Things stop working in that environment. Internet 1.0 wasn't the most stable development environment. To days Internet is stable specifically because its now boring.(easy to avoid browser and script differences excluded)
Applications like Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, etc were able to explode in popularity because they worked. No one had to worry about their ISP making a change and things not working. The days of walled gardens like AOL, Prodigy and others were gone. ... The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today. ... So, let me repeat, The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead for the foreseeable future..
I agree with Mark Cuban that the fundamental technologies that underly the Internet (DNS and TCP/IP) and the Web in particular (HTTP and HTML) are quite stable and are unlikely to undergo any radical changes anytime soon. If you are a fan of Internet infrastructure then the current world is quite boring because we aren't likely to ever see an Internet based on IPv8 or a Web based on HTTP 3.0. In addition, it is clear that the relative stability in the Web development environment and increase in the number of people with high bandwidth connections is what has led a number of the trends that are collectively grouped as "Web 2.0".
However Mark Cuban goes off the rails when he confuses his vision of the future of media as the only explosive exciting ideas that can be enabled by a global network like the Internet. Mark Cuban is an investor in HDNet which is a company that creates and distributes professionally produced content in high definition video formats. Mark would love nothing more than to distribute his content over the Internet especially since lack of interest in HDNet in the cable TV universe (I couldn't find any cable company on the Where to Watch HDNet page that actually carried the channel).
Unfortunately, Mark Cuban's vision of distributing high definition video over the Internet has two problems. The first is the fact that distributing high quality video of the Web is too expensive and the bandwidth of the average Web user is insufficient to make the user experience pleasant. The second is that people on the Web have already spoken and content trumps media quality any day of the week. Remember when pundits used to claim that consumers wouldn't choose lossy, compressed audio on the Web over lossless music formats? I guess no one brings that up anymore given the success of the MP3 format and the iPod. Mark Cuban is repeating the same mistake with his HDNet misadventure. User generated, poor quality video on sites like YouTube and larger library of content on sites like Netflix: Instant Viewing is going to trump the limited line up on services like HDNet regardless of how much higher definition the video quality gets.
Mark Cuban has bet on a losing horse and he doesn't realize it yet. The world has changed on him and he's still trying to work within an expired paradigm. It's like a newspaper magnate blaming printer manufacturers for not making it easy to print a newspaper off of the Web instead of coming to grips with the fact that the Internet with its blogging/social media/user generated content/craig's list and all that other malarky has turned his industry on its head.
This is what it looks like when a billionairre has made a bad investment and doesn't know how to recognize the smell of failure blasting his nostrils with its pungent aroma.