What Web 2.0 and Japanese Inventions Have in Common

When I was looking at a long list of new Web 2.0 startup companies yesterday, I couldn't help but think about a book that I got a few years ago: "101 (Un)useless Japanese Inventions". This wonderful little volume shows such great ideas as the full body umbrella, butter in the form of a roll-on stick, the subway snoozer's chin stand or eye drop funnel glasses.

All these nice products solve a real customer problem. But they do it in a way that is not really that useful: Most of the time, you have to carry a special device that is often large, difficult to use or simply quite ridiculous. The pain from actually using these inventions is so big that most people would prefer to live with the problem the invention is trying to solve.

Some Web 2.0 ideas remind me of these Japanese inventions: There are social network aggregators, OPML sharing services, specialized vertical search engines for every subject under the sun and mobile services for semi-anonymous dating.

Sure, all these services solve real problems that somebody, somewhere might have. But there are two big difficulties: First, the effort needed to learn how to use and configure these services is big, especially in relation to the often limited usefulness. Second, most of these services only work really well when a lot of people use them (the famous network effect at work...), and in most cases it will be really difficult to reach critical mass. Maybe some of these entrepreneurs should read Pip Coburn's book "The Change Function".

It's great that it has become so easy and cheap to found your own web-based company in this era of affordable Web 2.0 technology. But sometimes I ask myself if it hasn't become too easy. I think John Battelle is right when he says that startups simply don't fail fast enough anymore. Bad ideas happen, but it would probably be better for everybody involved if the companies that try to implement these ideas went out of business quickly. There are still enough good ideas that deserve the investment of talent and money now going to so many simply bad ideas.

Comments

[Pankaj]

Nice article. I guess most web 2.0 companies are like japanese inventions, but you never know when an ittsy bittsy idea catches on - Twitter (they just separated status updates from social networks), url shortners etc.