The Yourdon Report: Blog Archive: Recurring themes from my Web 2.0 visits

I visited eight Web 2.0 companies in the San Francisco Bay area last week, and was intrigued by the range of products and services they're offering; you can see the details in my blog entries for the past week.

But I was also intrigued by some common themes that I heard from almost every company I visited. I'll itemize them briefly here, and then discuss each of them in more detail in the next few days.

Yourdon goes on to list his five themes:

1. Email is broken
2. Young adults use the internet in a different way than do 30- and 40-something professional workers
3. People don't like to break context to grab additional information to perform a work task
4. Most vendors believe that mobile devices will play a large role in the evolution of their products and services, but they're not sure what form it will take
5. Web 2.0 may be over-hyped, and some of its vendors may not have a rational business model, but it's nevertheless "real"

OK, it's not as snappy as something Guy Kawasaki might come up with, but they're interesting nevertheless.

Yourdon also thinks that this crop of entrepreneurs has taken some of the lessons of the Big Flameout of Ought-One to heart.