Business 2.0: another Web 1.0 company bytes the dust
First EarthLink lays off 50% of its people and now Business 2.0 is closing.
The real Business 2.0 evaporated years ago when Time Warner bought it, canned everbody and wrapped the name around ECompanyNow content. I let my subscription lapse in silent protest, but then reupped a few years later when I happened across it and liked what I saw.
Ordinarily, I dislike the phrase “Web 2.0” — it seems like an intellectual life preserver. You don’t really know you’ve been in a Kuhnian paradigm shift until AFTER the shift. But somehow while I’m suspicious of Web 2.0 I’m comfy with Web 1.0 to describe early internet companies like EarthLink and Business 2.0… “me too” companies that haven’t survived endless waves of change and innovation.
For all its talk of innovation, EarthLink let AOL drive much of the innovation in the dial-up space, although I will add a caveat that I look back on the first-mover work we did with spamBlocker and Pop-Up Blocker with pride. Business 2.0 was a traditional magazine covering a non-traditional space, and as Wired started to pay more and more attention to the business world, and as a million websites and blogs popped up covering the same space, it withered.
So… who is next?
One Response to “Business 2.0: another Web 1.0 company bytes the dust”
1 josh 7 September 2007 @ 12:35 am
“Earthlink let AOL drive much of the innovation in the dial-up space” – why does that not sound impressive? More importantly for AOL, it finally got out of that space. It truly is a shame, it did seem like Earthlink was reinventing the telcom industry and then poof!
So lets have some hindsight fun here…how could Earthlink have saved itself?h