Why I am not worried ‘bout the Web…

I could not sleep last night! Some how the ongoing debate to cut down outsourcing is giving me all the jitters. And then when I finally caught a wink all I could see through the darkness was how web development industry would fare.
Thank my god, it ain’t that scary.

The year 2001 spelt near doom of web development when the dot-com bubble burst. But call it destiny or whatever… but it survived through that era. In 2008 however, even though the US economy’s doesn’t look that promising, there’s more hope for the web to follow the economy’s course rather than shatter and fall below it.
Business commentators have drafted out charts and graphs to document how revenues will remain steady even against a backdrop of stagflation, war, and other economic tensions.
The web will thrive, sure it will, but I guess it has more do with how the Web has become an ordinary part of our lives.

• In 2001, Internet was only making its way to the doors of many American homes. It was like the dish TV’s of today. Like people did know how to live with it. Cut to the present and I see kids who can’t even begin to think of a life without the internet. It’s like someone telling you to imagine your world minus water!!! Be it keeping in touch with friends and family or setting up an entire business, the World Wide Web has everyone in its net.

• The dot com boom and bust was all about get consumers to come somewhere and buy things. When the deals looked less exciting, customers simply stopped coming. The past few years have seen an explosion of sites built on sharing and communication between visitors, not just between buyers and sellers. Those communities have become a part of people’s daily lives, an important part of their social life. This doesn’t mean that people spend all day staring at Facebook or Orkut or blogs - but it does mean that people have integrated those sites into their daily lives.

• It would be an understatement to say that we have adapted to the web, rather we are addicted to it. Having a web site for a business is no longer a huge special event - it’s something normal. Lots of people now turn to the Web rather than the phone book when they want to find out what a store’s hours are. Actually don’t put yourself at risk by not having one!

• It was a different story back in the 90s. Putting up a web site was a big deal, like equal to constructing a mall or something. It was all about investing a lot of time, costly hosting and bandwidth, specialized developers, and a mindset that poured money into building audience size at any cost. Today, you can do even large-scale hosting at much lower cost, web skills are a more ordinary part of skill sets for administrative assistants, Java programmers, and database gurus alike.

• Gone is the era of snail mail. And with it, has gone that limitation of trade. The Web reaches well past local stores and local customers. If someone somewhere on the globe likes what you have, it’s much easier to conduct a transaction now than it used to be. This might be stabilizing - international customers may be responding to different economic stimuli than local ones. Of course, the value in that depends on other areas doing better than the local economy.

• There are still immense new projects coming on to the Web, but there’s also a tremendous amount that’s already up, developed, thought of as monthly maintenance costs rather than intense new expenditures. While this may not look like a bright new horizon for entrepreneurs, it does provide the Web with some much-needed ballast to keep it stable through whatever waves the economy throws at it.

I’m sure I’ve left out a lot of reasons for stability, and at the same time I doubt that the web world will shrug off the impact of broader economic busts or booms. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and other big players have, after all, become a key part of our economy, tightly integrated with all kinds of businesses on their way up or down.
What I don’t see today, however, is the kind of industry collapse that happened in 2000 and 2001.
And with this optimism to count on, I can get now get a good nights sleep!

Good Night!