Why the semantic Web will not fail

A comment I ended up posting in response to a very interesting post by another blogger.
Why the Semantic Web Will Fail http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/03/why-semantic-web-will-fail.html

Here is my take on why the semantic web will be the future.

The main argument on why the semantic web will fail is that it requires cooperation between businesses. This is predicted to be quite far fetched. Hence Semantic web will fail. Check out the blog for the whole argument and how the author, Stephen Downes, feels that way.

Here is my short take on why web 2.0 will lead to cooperation.

If we observe the internet technology and economy, the innovation, and what becomes standard, comes from struggling startups.

MySpace, YouTube, Google, Yahoo, etc. innovated when they were startups. Startups luckily do not have an option but to innovate and create new business rules and markets that create an advantage for themselves.

The Big Players behave to retain the advantange that they have. They can innovate too for the same reason but most often the status quo is comfortable and advantageous at the same time.

I would think that basing the success of semantic web and web 2.0 collaboration completely on big corporates is incorrect.

We have to take into account the chance that there will always be smaller players who will push for an evolution towards cooperation, if that is the only way they can gain an advantage in the market.

If that is what appeals the consumers the big corporates will have a tough time working against this force of cooperation.

It will be interesting to analyze the internet business and technology on the basis of game theory, where the players are individual consumers,small startups and big corporates and try to find out the Nash equilibrium(a set of strategies that is beneficial to all parties) that is prevailing or will prevail.

Here is one quick analysis.

Lets say the players are corporates who want to make money, the startups who want to make money, the individual consumer who wants to spend money but get good value for that money.

I am assuming It is safe to say that every individual consumer wants to consume services that are seamless and work effortlessly with other services.

A small example: I want my photo to be available to me in the camera, to my wife on my home pc and to my family over a internet site as easily and seamlessly as possible.

Don't you think that the corporates and startups can make money only if they make this possible.
Same example: I upload the photo to my PC and organize them using picasa, which also helps me seamlessly upload it to snapfish which is a different business entity than google. I ended up using picasa as a photo manager because that's the feature I like.

Similarly for other services I am predicting the same behaviour, meaning seamless collabaration will become an important characteristic of every internet service , because it will become more lucrative than non-cooperative models.

I am sure more analysis is due but this, my friend, is my intuition.


P.S. I am reading 'Moral Calculations' a great read on game theory.
I have ended up analyzying how much time I spend taking a dump using game theory :-)