1/21 必読記事・論考(IT) - My Life Between Silicon Valley and Japan

In just ten years the Web has altered the way we grab information, manage our firms and organize our lives. China likely will surpass the U.S. this year in the number of Web surfers, a development few saw in 1995. Still, the day is young! The Web in 2005 is like the airplane in 1913 or the television in 1954, when Edward R. Murrow fricasseed a sweating Senator Joe McCarthy before the cameras.

This year video Weblogs are sure to be the "it" thing. The shape of the v-blog trend began to emerge late last year during the election campaign. Example:A half-million people watched CNN's Crossfire on an October night when comedian Jon Stewart happened to be a guest. Stewart played it mean and bitter, ripping apart hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson. The segment made its way onto blogs, and there it was clicked by2.5 million unique visitors--five times as many as had watched it on TV. (Earlier this month CNN took Crossfire off the air.)

But now the coolest products are being aimed at the masses from the get-go--iPods, DVDs and gigabyte memory sticks, not to mention terabytes of Google-accessible free content. Even software is following this trend. A generation ago the Sabre airline-seat yield management system, written for a few dozen carriers, was the neatest trick in the travel industry. Now it's Orbitz, aimed at billions of consumers.

Google saves tens of millions of dollars by using cheap.consumer-class servers--more than 100,000 of them, actually--to power its search algorithm. Early in its life Google reasoned that consumer-priced technology was as good as business-priced technology if you configured it right. That's why Google continues to pour its resources into hiring bright people, not into buying the fastest boxes. Advantages, Google believes, are to be found in clever use, not in the hardware itself. Google saves so much on hardware costs that it sports an annual cash-flow run rate of around $400 million, exceeding that of older Web superstars with greater annual sales, such as Ebay and Yahoo.

V-blogs, cheap technology ably performing business chores and a new golden era for startups--rich rewards await the entrepreneurs who knit these trends together.