The following is a guest post by Jeremy Victor. Jeremy is CEO and founder of Make Good Media, a publisher and new media marketing agency. He also serves as Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com, Make Good Media’s online B2B marketing publication.
Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle hosted yet another very good Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco a few weeks ago. While I did not have the fortune of attending the event in person, I did take advantage of the real-time stream and watched quite a few of the presentations and interviews. (All the Web 2.0 Summit presentations are also now archived on YouTube.)
The Web 2.0 Summit is billed as “the only place, once a year, where leaders of the Internet Economy gather to debate and determine business strategy.” While “the only” can be debated, O’Reilly and Battelle do attract many of today’s leading thinkers and visionaries shaping the future of business, education, and the non-profit world. Mary Meeker, Tony Hsieh, Eric Schmidt, Ron Conway and many more stepped on stage and shared their thoughts on what’s next.
Ron Conway’s session titled, “The Crystal Ball” was especially interesting as it featured a sampling of ten of his recent investments. Each of the entrepreneurs had 30 seconds to share their vision. To quote Conway, “It’s amazing what you can learn in 30 seconds.”
The theme of this year’s Web 2.0 Summit was “Points of Control,” the idea that we’ve reached an inflection point of sorts after fifteen years of the commercial Internet. Battelle states, “it’s clear that our industry has moved into a competitive phase—a “middlegame” in the battle to dominate the Internet Economy.” To illustrate this Battelle and O’Reilly introduced, the Point of Control: The Web 2.0 Summit Map:
The Points of Control map is an interactive visualization of the economy surrounding the current Internet landscape. From search, location, and video to mobile, e-commerce, and tablet computing, the map shows the convergence of what’s old and what’s new.
By now, you may be thinking what does any of this have to do with Mark Zuckerberg. Well, Battelle interviewed Zuckerberg (a must watch) and the topic of the map came up in one of Zuckerberg’s responses to a question from the audience. Below is the transcript of the dialogue, though I highly recommend viewing it (excerpt is 1:01:00 – 1:03:15). I was as equally impressed with what Zuckerberg has to say about the map as I was with how he said it.
Zuckerberg: The first chapter has been about building Facebook the application … the site that people use every day. The long term, if you buy my vision of what plays out over the next five years, having every vertical being rethought and rebuilt around social by brilliant entrepreneurs, you see a future where the vast majority of the social ecosystem will not be Facebook, but we will help those businesses get built. To use your term, we will enable them.
I like this Points of Control map you have up here but … my first instinct was, “your map is wrong.”
Battelle: (laughing) Of course, it’s wrong, it’s version one.
Zuckerberg: No, seriously, because I think that the biggest part of the map is, has got to be, the “unchartered territory.” [Note: The map has none.]
O’Reilly: That’s great, that’s good.
Zuckerberg: One of the great things about the technology industry is that it is not a zero sum game. This thing [the map] makes it seem like a zero sum game, in order to take territory, you have to be taking territory from someone else.
But I think one of the best things is we are building real value in the world, not just taking value from other companies.
Battelle: Absolutely, you are totally right. I think our point is we are seeing a lot of companies acting as if it were a zero sum game. And that seems to be framing the debate and it’s … refreshing to hear you say that.
Zuckerberg: So, that’s our view. Our view is not only that it should expand and we should enable it to expand. That our best strategy and the best thing for the web would be for us to enable the next set of entrepreneurs to go build all those businesses and not do it all ourselves because I don’t think we can.
O’Reilly: That’s a great argument for why you are going to win.
Zuckerberg: [very humbly, almost under his breath] We’ll see.
This one answer tells us so much about Zuckerberg. He’s visionary. He immediately found the fatal flaw in the map; it had no frontier, and it didn’t take into account the new value that is being created in the economy. It was a thought that had never even crossed my mind, (nor Battelle or O’Reilly’s based on their reactions). Zuckerberg is viewing the world through a different lens than the rest of us, and it’s this view that makes him the ruler of the social web.
For a long time, I’ve been unsure what to think of Zuckerberg. Lucky? Right place, right time? Thief? Genius? He actually may be all of the above, but at this point I don’t think it matters as I have to agree with O’Reilly, he is going to win.