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molly.com
Monday 15 October 2007
Shift in the Web Wind
It’s autumn here in the US. Time for pumpkins and Halloween and a different season. The seasons are changing. I can smell it on the Web wind.
I feel there’s a major shift in our industry. It concerns me so I want to chat about it with you.
The latest Dot.Com boom is declining as far as I can tell. Are we on the edge of another Dot.Bomb? What do we do?
What’s changing for you?
Filed under: Blogroll, community, creativity, faith(less), innovation, molly asks you, policies, professional, society, standards, web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 01:17 | Comments (50)
I really hope it isn’t another dot bomb. The first one (which I survived through) was bad enough, with client confidence in the web industry eroded for the next few years. Let’s hope it’s a hiccup and not a crash!
In the SME area I’m not over affected other than clients seem to expect to pay less and less for web work with more and more sophisticated content.
Something I have been thinking about recently too; but saying that I see no real evidence of things slowing down here in the UK – something highlighted in the fact that I was in rather high demand when looking for a new job (which I now have :>).
What could be a problem is a lack of skill in the general ‘employment pool’ but I see that more of an education issue, and things are clearly much much better than they were before.
Lets see what happens in the next 6 months….
I’m not sure the boom is over yet – we’re all just tired and need a nap.
Hmm, I’m not really seeing any signs of slowing down. What exactly are you seeing, Molly, that leads you to think the latest boom is on the decline?
I’m not aware of any decline as such, but then I’m not freelance and tend not to know too much about demand/supply in the market. However, I have definitely had a lot more feelings in the general area of ‘meh’ recently as far as web things are concerned. So many sites launching with so many crazy names, all doing long tail stuff that I really can’t be arsed to sign up for. Here’s a telling sign – in my RSS feeds, on a given day , most will have 1, 2, or 3 new entries. I don’t read over the weekend, come back on a Monday and check the feeds, and one of then has 50 posts. That’s 50 that I won’t bother reading because it’s frankly far too effing much. That site is mashable. For me, the sheer deluge of info on there suggests to me that for every successful site that comes along, there are plenty of others that may be useful or well designed/constructed but will fall into the ‘I couldn’t really give a rat’s arse about it’ category. That’s my indicator!
Hi!
@miles, I know, I went through it too, and you can see where I am at
Ross:
I do believe it’s a wait and see thing. I’m not saying that those with real skillz are going to get left out. I just see a rift.
Jeff!
You ask a great question.
I’ll say it as simply as I can: There is precious little vision and only technique. One can make beautiful designs all one wants, but if one can’t progress the technology, I’m not sure if this is the right place.
You are a teacher Jeff. Don’t stop. What you do matters more than you might know, I mean that!
I’m not sure that we’re riding the same sort of over-the-top venture capital spending, but some of the buyout/takeover figures have been ridiculous. That said, some of mad ones (eg. YouTube) have been by companies that can spend that big without going under if they don’t make squillions back from that particular move.
But, I wasn’t *really* there during the first bomb. I was safely ensconced in a uni job at the time. Universities never have any money so it doesn’t really make that big a difference
@ian, @Ben
I don’t think it’s so much a vc issue. It is, to quote James Craig and who he quoted when he speaks about “quality of craft” that I get concerned. Clearly, we’ve had quality of craft issues.
Molly, you say: “There is precious little vision and only technique…” Maybe an increasing number of people are waiting for the ‘next big thing’ now, after they’ve seen that the low-hanging web 2.0 fruit is just about plucked? I guess it will be a shift of focus. (Semantic web anyone?)
I’d second Ross on the employment market. Finding good people is increasingly hard – it;’s definately an employees market.
Living out in the sticks (ok, so not in a hot bed of internet startups) I only see more demand and more interest in all things web. Intersted to hear you think it might be slowing in the middle of the maelstrom so to speak?
I think you summed it up with “The latest Dot.Com boom is declining”. I think I’m right in saying last time it didn’t so much decline as run headlong off a cliff, Wile E. Coyote style.
A bit of a decline might not be an entirely bad thing anyway. It might make people wake up a bit — the US$ might be weak right now, but surely not so much that a popular website is worth billions? OK, so it might have a lot of users, but they demand the service for free. How are you ever going to make that sort of investment back?
You’re always going to get people who are in it for a quick buck. I think that’s where you’ll find the quality of craft issues. I’d expect the ones who get it right to be around for the longer term.
Besides, when have we ever had a time when there weren’t quality of craft issues?
Are we on the edge of another dot bomb? Perhaps. More and more people are trying to enter the industry, trying to create the newest startup to be gobbled up by one of the giants… Meanwhile, companies like the one I work for just continue to do the best work we can for clients … and we seem to be doing to pretty well for ourselves. (*knock on wood*) If there’s a bubble about to burst, I can only hope that we’re not effected (much).
I think a lot of the problem is having a decent workforce / talent pool. I’ve personally been on a few projects recently that seemed like a good idea, but are stuck in a holding pattern due to lack of developers and designers.
The workforce here in New England seems to be flooded with people that have no idea what they’re doing. I know of companies here in Manchester that are losing clients and money because they can’t keep talented people on staff. This may be different on the West Coast, but around here finding a developer that has even a slight clue is a big win.
On a related note, I think the current decline is partially do to lack of innovation. Most of the stuff I see launched is just a re-hash of an existing service or site. Even Facebook is really just a better execution of MySpace.
I started looking at this stuff from a different angle a while ago. Remember the (Western) Roman Empire? It was glorious, but slowly and steadily, peoples from the outside, with a much different culture, started tearing it down. In 476, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire was ditched by the first barbarian king of Italy, clearly a take-over that could bring nothing but bad – “barbarian” ring a bell?
And so the Dark Ages began. But isn’t that essentially negative thinking? The Dark Ages are mostly badly documented, not per se non-existent. After the Dot.Bomb, there will be darkness: people will not see the real face of a web in shreds, because they avoid it, because the only visible things are the simple and big things (providers, newspapers). But for those living through it all, the knowledge is still there. We still know how work is done. Our knowledge is great, so if it will fall, it will merely* be a structural downfall, not an intellectual one. That is a difference.
In the Dark Ages, you’re King if you build a temple. You’re Wisdom if you write and read. You’re God if you teach. What fear is there of the Dark Ages for people with skill? Are you afraid?
* Merely? Alright, yeah, that’s still bad enough.
I gather you’re talking about the web business in general? A bomb would imply massive losses of investment, yes, so to me that suggests the Sand Hill Road microcosm and the VC world in general. From where I sit, that is quite separate from the rest of the web industry in general. Nearly everybody I know is not in the VC game and are just in business or education or nonprofits, so maybe there’s unease in that world, I don’t know.
But my sense is that the use of the web is growing, more people and organizations are engaging in conversations, and innovation is flourishing. Am I Pollyanna?
From the agency side, it’s the opposite (at least in the UK) – there’s so much work around that everyone I know is having to outsource or turn it away – but I have to agree with Ian; if the signal-to-noise ratio coming out of something like Mashable is any indicator of activity vs. value in the web startup sphere, it does feel as if we’re reaching, if not a bust, then at least saturation point.
Over here on the East coast (i’m in Wash. DC), it has been a particularly exciting time to be in the Web and technology. It feels like things are just starting to pick up. Every few days I hear about someone who is trying to do something in a new and exciting way.
Molly, As a recent benefactor of Jeff’s teaching (and yours), I couldn’t agree more that the educational circumstances are always the key in times such as these.
The original dot.bomb, to my observation, was centered on the lack of understanding of what was truly possible given the technology of the day. I don’t see such a gap now, but the training and educating of those creating content and making infrastructure choices is just as important for the momentum to continue.
I might be a bit off the beaten track with this, but I think consumer confidence in websites, other than the big ones like Amazon.com, is decreasing. I attribute this to:
1.) Spam spiraling out of control. Who can you trust? Do people really read email newsletters that vendors send out? I’m guessing not, especially when some email clients automatically put those types of email into the Junk/Spam or Deleted Items folders.
2.) Security Freak, Microsoft. There are so many security features on Vista/IE 7, that the user constantly is being questioned as to their actions. It can make you quite paranoid.
3.) Too many uneducated designers producing crappy designs for legitimate vendors of good products. Poor “Mom and Pop” businesses out there are getting the short end of the design stick because there are a plethora of web designers who have FrontPage /Dreamweaver and no knowledge of web design. When the site looks crummy, it doesn’t look legitimate to the viewer. When the site isn’t used to its potential, confidence in web marketing goes down from both the vendor and the viewer.
4.) Google Ads. You have to wonder about a business that advertises other businesses on its website. When you walk into a Wal-Mart, you don’t see ads for Sears or K-Mart.
That’s just my two (or four) cents.
I’ve been having a similar air of change recently. I don’t think at all we’re headed for another Dot.Bomb, but I do think a lot of people are going to lose their jobs in the near future. Too many people rely today on a skillset solely based on HTML and CSS — a skillset easily adopted by someone who takes their weekend to learn the languages.
I think we’re seeing a shift… a shift where more is expected of us web developers. The web has moved to the desktop, and the desktop has moved to the web. It’s no secret the playing field has changed, but so many developers are happy re-learning how to clear a float that they’re missing the new generation of interactive content.
Anyways, there goes my stream of consciousness for what it’s worth.
I am a freelancer located in the Boston area and if anything I am busier than I ever and in the past it was hard enough to keep up with the demand. I have found that when the economy is doing poorly my business actually picks up for it is even more important for my clients to have a greater web presence. So I am fortunately not feeling it, hope it stays this way.
Molly, I just returned from Australia. Things are booming down there. Lots of small companies are hiring. I got the idea there aren’t enough qualified people to fill all the openings. Anyone ‘down under’ to confirm?
I suppose the “quality of craft” issue could end the boom, if you define a boom as a time when anybody who seems to know what a website is can make a fortune… but we’re definitely not having a dot.bomb like the last one.
Last time around, the conclusion everyone reached was that this web thing was never going to work. This time, they want to find somebody who can do it properly… which I think is good news for real craftspeople.
There’s a lot of work here going on with large corporate (public sector) redevelopment which shows potential – migrations out of FrontPage and Lotus Notes into better CMS options. Unfortunately while there are gov’t policies in place demanding WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 as a minimum bar, user centred design etc… well nobody in there even knows those policies exist unless I email them… which is frustrating.
So while there are potentially great opportunities to get into a project management role that could greatly benefit these organisations they tend to fall back onto their current web guy (aka FrontPage Freddy) who just says it’s all a crock. And its very hard to lobby against while they marginalise you as an extremist.
So I can see there is a bit of a boom here over the last couple of years although at present it isn’t quite ready to plateau. On the other hand SMEs are only willing to pay for rubbish, don’t seem to get the idea of developing relationships with the customer, and have budgets sub $1000 Australian (many of them anyway)… not worth pursueing.
I guess what I’m saying is there seems to be a lot going on at the top and bottom of the market – this is coincidentally where in an overcrowded market the people survive. [maybe that was all babble and I should go have breakfast molly, great to see you posting again!]
“Dot.Com” is pronounced “dot dot com”. Surely you meant either “.com” or “dot com”.
@brad : no, this is Web 2.0 right? dot dot com and dot dot bomb would be accurate by my measure
Hmm, I was actually getting the same sort of sense about things too Molly…(in fact I was going to write about it recently on my own site, but just haven’t got round to it yet! That will change shortly…haha!)
My response is similar to Matthew Pennell’s comments, above, although there’s no outright slowing down of web work (at least in the UK)…the saturation point or ‘ceiling’ of what is being done is close to being peaked…and that’s quite uncomfortable.
I think Kevin’s right: maybe things are just a bit tired and over-worked right now!
I also agree with Ian (Lloyd’s) remark about too many new sites with weird and wonderful names popping-up (jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon) that really are quite useless ultimately…’trying to reinvent the wheel is not the same as inventing the jet-engine is it?’
For many reasons, there’s unlikely to be another ‘dot-com crash’ to rival the original one…but, that’s not to say there can’t be something similar – only on a smaller, less-dramatic scale at sometime in the not too distant future.
I’ve probably stated this before – but I sincerely feel that the Web Industry needs to become a lot more of a united, and professional industry at large if it’s going to get through some really rough times…as an industry, it’s perhaps to vulnerable and fickle right now.
[...] Molly senses a shift in the web wind: Mark knows where it’s blowing us to — and his vision is both challenging and optimistic. [...]
From the employment perspective, I definitely sense a shift in the past few weeks, but I don’t think it’s web-specific. I think it’s hitting the entire economy. A couple of months ago, I was getting unsolicited calls from recruiters at least once a day. I didn’t have my resume up on Monster or HotJobs; these recruiters were finding my resume on my own web site. Then the sub-prime mortgage market blew up, and stocks took a major tumble. The Fed cut interest rates more than expected, and stocks went up. Immediately, the calls stopped.
I had a phone interview with a startup in New York a little over a month ago, for a direct position, a week or two before the collapse. It went very well, and there was talk about next steps. A couple of weeks after, after the collapse, I pinged the guy I talked to to find out the status. The job was put on hold, they would call me when things unjammed. No problem, it’s not like the job was mine or anything, I just had one interview that seemed to go well.
A week later, the same job showed up on the 37 Signals board, where I had found it the first time, except that now it was a freelance job. The number of jobs showing up there and on Authentic Jobs seems to have dropped (although I haven’t been keeping counts).
With the economy so volatile, businesses seem to be taking a wait and see attitude to see if things are going into the toilet or not.
Hell of a time for me to lose my current job, but of course, that’s exactly what happened. I’m a free man as of Friday. Sigh….
From a vision standpoint, yeah, the creative juices seem to be running a bit dry industry-wide. Lots of “me too” stuff going on. MySpace for cats, yet another search engine, whatever, yawn.
I’m not particularly noticing any slowdown – what I am noticing is a huge shortage of developers who are actually qualified to take on what is now demanded of a web developer.
In fact, I now believe that if you’re not a hybrid-type, you are falling short of what is required; design and development are starting to go hand in hand, at least at SME level based on what I see. This is more apparent if you are a developer who doesn’t design, as opposed to a designer who doesn’t develop, since there is always graphic work needing to be done, whereas a developer just can’t churn out a “raw looking” bunch of output – it has to look nice.
I hope in some way that the dot-bomb is happening again – it weeded out a lot of crap the first time, i.e. people who promised the earth and couldn’t actually deliver because they didn’t really have the skills. Having said that, this caused a lack of faith in the industry for years and as such made doing business more difficult, so I don’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed
Also … I feel that people are now just “doing” as opposed to “learning and explaining” … people now have more understanding than they did a couple of years ago and don’t particularly feel the need to blog about their skills any more… because everyone’s on more-or-less the same level
@Ralph : you make an excellent point particularly about the US economic issues going on right now. That might be what I’m sensing.
@Steve, believe me, people are most definitely NOT on the same level. My job is to teach and explain, and there’s no shortage of that need. Just view source on most sites outside of the blogging/standards communities and you’ll see utter crap. Really.
I have to agree with Ian Muir first – I’m working in the Boston area and I’m seeing a lot of people coming out of certificate programs who know nothing about web design or development – but are getting all the work! What kind of site can be designed by someone, for example, whose full experience with JavaScript consisted of a 3-day crash course without any actual programming? No offense to melissa from above, since I don’t know anything about your skills, but the people I’ve encountered recently don’t deserve the title.
I’m also seeing what Ralph’s talking about – people are doing the “wait-and-see” rather than hiring, or worse – laying off the employees they already have.
I was laid off in April from a company that needed to “reduce overhead” … obviously that meant canceling all in-progress redesigns. I’ve been doing contract work since then. Last week, I was asked to interview at a local company, but then they turned around and laid off the entire department the very next day. They didn’t even bother contacting me about it – I only found out what happened because my friend was one of those designers. (Note the past tense.)
From what I’ve seen recently, most companies are looking for a jack-of-all-trades employee – one who can do graphic design, web design, and development including but not limited to HTML, XHTML, CSS, ColdFusion, ASP, PHP, RoR, RSS, SQL, XML, VB.net, AJAX and/or JavaScript, Flash and ActionScript…
I must agree with Steve Woods that if we are to have another dot-bomb it will help clean up the market. Yet like other cleansings, it will also mean that good people will also get hurt. It’s the natural progression of the species I guess. I find that I am busier than ever but my audiences are smaller, more specific and the content proprietary. Hmmm, creating private jewels for smaller audiences not quite my vision. Happily I have managed to build and expanding my social networking group. I do think hybrid skill sets are critical for the coming down turn in the economy.
>What’s changing for you?
Professionalisation. It’s finally coming.
@ppk : spot on! there is a rationalisation going on. old folk like me who lived through the desktop publishing revolution will recognise the pattern. The demand for higher quality is squeezing the ‘me too’ operators, while the skilled people are setting the bar higher and higher.
The industry is splitting into definite strata.
oh and by the way @Will Mason: things are very busy here in OZ!
Interesting.. Like others here I’m seeing precisely the opposite. I’ve received more unsolicited business and calls from recruiters in the past 2 months than ever before – all while I’m looking to hire someone and struggling to find talent. Maybe I’m just in the right place though? If anything – I see a serious lack of available talent – I think the recovery from dot.bomb left lots of demand, but scared away the supply…
Remember what busted, in large part, was big ideas with big flaws. Stuff that you would look at and say, “Why would anyone want to do, use, see, need, that?” People poured money into marginal ideas that, in the end, collapsed under the dead weight of speculation.
Perhaps we are approaching another plateau. One where the applications again fall short of the technology. If that is the case, the best protection is the same as always: to scrutinize the projects we align ourselves with and to move in the opposite direction of those who believe marketing trumps value, that talking people out of their money is the object of all things.
Okay Molly, here’s an update, I’ve written a bit more about my thoughts on this matter in this article: http://www.mattrobin.com/article/45/dot-com-crash-20
The Web 2.0 bubble began to stretch, in my opinion, when companies started asking for Ajax without knowing what it was. It’s been a gradual decline, held partially in check by bitter experience, for the past three or so years.
What will save us this time, more than anything else, is investors who don’t want to get burned twice. Yeah, there’s plenty of pain, and the “let’s get webbish.. 2.0!” bubble will eventually disintegrate, but not in such a spectacular way as the so-called web 1.0 bubble. Rather, I think that Web 2.0 will fade away and slowly be integrated into the more stable future web that is being built every day.
[...] Sometimes, really good ideas can come from chat. I was discussing Molly’s article about a possible new dotBoom (or something like it) with the esteemed author a few days ago and it became too interesting to keep it to ourselves. More precisely, it’s a comparison I draw about momentum, crap and quality, especially as seen on the internet these days. It is not in line of the other comments, not even my own, as seen there, but a proper continuation of our chat. [...]
I think one issue is that it has actually become very easy to get a site up and running. Using online tools like Wordpress you can actually get a professional looking site up and running without paying a penny and without having to know anything about the web. This is great.
But. It also means that more and more people are creating content that is at best useless. I think one real problem on the web right now is that too many people are trying to invent the next great social networking app without actually thinking about the content. I don’t see much innovation around the production of content.
Web development has been fine tuned down to Ruby on Rails. Web design has been streamlined into some really high quality and free online design sites. But content? Other than a few Nielsen alert boxes there’s not much about producing content worth reading. I for one think the web has turned too much into a design medium when it is really about content. Stop trying to complicate things with AJAX and just let people find the info using high quality indexing, taxonomy and search tools.
Holzschlag–
Glad to see that you are alive and kicking.
The Web is in dire need of a hard shakeout in all aspects. It suffers from too much bullshit, too little substance, too much money chasing too few deals, too many geeks wagging the communication dog, too many useless concepts and pseudo technologies, too many wannabes, blah blah blah [...].
As far as your post regarding possible rework of your blog [I am just too damn lazy to post this correctly], maybe what is important is what you say and if it ain’t broke, don’t be fixin it?
Sidebar: Thanks for giving them hell. Never back down.
Massart noted:
That nail was hit square on the head. Businesses included.
@robin, I agree with you on the content. To use Molly’s terms – Content is King! At least, I first heard it from her
.
From my view, the market seems to be doing quite well still. There are lots of open positions, but very few people to fill them. From my experience trying to fill positions, there are soooooo many people claiming to be web designers and developers who can barely answer even the most basic questions in an interview. And I know a lot of them are out there representing us as “web professionals” to smaller businesses, and even larger ones.
I’ve seen a lot of large budget projects recently that are in jeopardy first because they can’t find quality people, then stay in jeopardy because they go ahead and hire crappy people (that’s all that are available!) because of timelines, and get very poor results – busted timelines, over budget and barely working products that really need to be thrown out and started over correctly. All of the good people are in positions they like with permanent employment, or contractors buried in work and aren’t available. It’s such a rare find to run across somebody who really understands what’s going on looking for permanent employment. It’s a little distressing.
To some degree, I welcome a downturn. I had no problems through the first bomb, and don’t expect any in another. It’s the people who don’t know anything wanting to cash in on things that’ll have to find another line of work, or actually do some real training and figure out how things work. When budgets get tighter, so too does the attention to quality. In tight times, there’s no room for a freeloader “professional” to hang around not contributing.
I’m annoyed by the talent pool, but I’m very excited about the future. Things like the iPhone really have a chance to make the mobile web useful, and technologies like Adobe’s AIR (previously Apollo) are very promising as well – opening up new doors and opportunities. I think the work will be a plenty for the true web professionals out there, regardless of the economy.
Gawd, I hate when I’m so verbose! Sorry.
>Interesting.. Like others here I’m seeing precisely the
>opposite [of professionalisation]. I’ve received more >unsolicited business and
>calls from recruiters in the past 2 months than ever >before – all while I’m looking to hire someone and >struggling to find talent. Maybe I’m just in the right >place though? If anything – I see a serious lack of >available talent – I think the recovery from dot.bomb >left lots of demand, but scared away the supply…
That’s the flip side of the problem. The reason you’re called so often is that you’re a professional; and clients aren’t content any more with people who hardly know a CSS selector from an invoice.
True, real talent is hard to get, but at least we now know there’s a difference between me-too-people and really talented ones, and we’re going to be able to define the difference any time now.
Now the only thing that needs to happen is less talented (or simply less experienced) people taking cues from their more talented (or more experienced) counterparts, and starting to learn modern web development. That’s more easily said than done, but I feel market forces are conspiring to push the people who don’t *want* to learn out of their jobs.
Good riddance, says I.
Over here on the East coast (i’m in Wash. DC), it has been a particularly exciting time to be in the Web and technology. It feels like things are just starting to pick up. Every few days I hear about someone who is trying to do something in a new and exciting way.
I am a freelancer located in the Boston area and if anything I am busier than I ever and in the past it was hard enough to keep up with the demand. I have found that when the economy is doing poorly my business actually picks up for it is even more important for my clients to have a greater web presence. So I am fortunately not feeling it, hope it stays this way.
Living out in the sticks (ok, so not in a hot bed of internet startups) I only see more demand and more interest in all things web. Intersted to hear you think it might be slowing in the middle of the maelstrom so to speak?
I’ve been having a similar air of change recently. I don’t think at all we’re headed for another Dot.Bomb, but I do think a lot of people are going to lose their jobs in the near future. Too many people rely today on a skillet solely based on HTML and CSS — a skillet easily adopted by someone who takes their weekend to learn the languages.
I think we’re seeing a shift… a shift where more is expected of us web developers. The web has moved to the desktop, and the desktop has moved to the web. It’s no secret the playing field has changed, but so many developers are happy re-learning how to clear a float that they’re missing the new generation of interactive content.