I was deeply saddened to learn that even blogger has been hit by this downturn in the web economy. Blogger is a really fine service. And there has to be a way to make a buck off of it in order to keep it going (if that’s what it takes to keep it going). If you’re only on the web to make money, your on the web for the wrong reasons. It’s hard to make money on the web. But the web is a fantastic asset to any company that already has a product to support. Just today, for instance, I needed to hook my USB Zip250 drive up to my laptop. I didn’t have the installer CD because I thought I’d already installed the drivers. Five years ago, I would have had to drive home for the CD. If I’d lost it (or if is stopped working, or if they upgrade the drivers and other software), I’d have had to write the company or call them and work through their automated answering service and get them to send me a new copy (with me paying postage). Turnaround time? Probably two weeks. But today, I just went to iomega.com and downloaded the drivers. No problems. It probably took ten minutes of my day..
That’s the sort of thing the web is great for. You can distribute electronic files very easily. But, so far, it works better if you’re distributing files to support a physical product that you’re selling (that is, if making money is part of your goal). Besides making money, of course, there are lots of other great things you can do with the web. No profits use the web extensively to get their message out and help serve their clients.
Saddened as I am by the shrinking web job market, the web was still a fine place before everyone got into the game and tried to make a buck at being on the web. I’ve been around long enough to see this come and go. I’ve surfed with Mosaic. I had to go to a lab in order to use such high-fire-power software. From home, I had to use lynx through a telnet connection. I remember when Mosaic turned into Netscape. And I remember when Netscape 3.0 came out and I didn’t like it because it ran too slow on my 68040-based Macintosh (in fact, I only kept it around for running pages that wouldn’t work in my default browser–Netscape 2.1). I’m not one of those neo-luddite techheads who think the web and making a buck can’t mix. They *can* mix, but it’s been a painful learning process to figure out in which ways they can mix. At first, businesses lacked caution in approaching the web. Now they’re too cautious. I hope these things level out before I find myself in the job market again.