1 The Web's New Value Chain And PLC

The new generation of Web platforms, including Meta's Metaverse, is

powered by AR/VR. This said, the Web's value chain and PLC remain

unchanged

Product Life Cycle Positioning As shown on the graph below, for the past

20 years, by paying top dollar to acquire upstarts, the traditional ITC companies (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Adobe, Salesforce,..), along with the FAANGs (Amazon, Google), and the major private equity firms specializing in high-tech (Vista, Permira, TPG, Thoma Bravo), have aggressively scaled up the new market

for Cloud Platform products, at that key intersection point along the product

life cycle when market adoption and market growth are at their peak. Today, as

Cloud platforms, which cater mainly to the IT infrastructure market at the back-end, begin to sag and enter the maturity stage, Web platforms, which

cater mainly to the user application market at the front-end, will take over as

the next major growth driver

First to Market  To us, the Next Gen Web remains essentially any current

2D platform, which has been enhanced with new 3D graphical technologies

used on Online Gaming platforms. These new technologies are AR and VR,

which are nothing more than enhancements of Pixar's computer-animated

film technology first used in Toy Story in 1995. Where both markedly differ

from the older version is in their low-code/no-code feature. This key feature

allows ordinary users with little knowledge of programming to be creators,

capable of developing their own digital products on the new low code Web platforms. This also applies to physical products, which can be designed

online, then cast and produced on the shop floor using digital twin software,

an enhanced, integrated version of 3D CAD/CAM and EDA software

Products - Platforms & Apps Very young entrepreneurs (Bezos, Page and Brin, Zuckerberg) seized the opportunity provided by 4G and more interactive

languages (C, Javascript) to launch the first eCommerce, Search and Social

Media platforms. On their heels, user apps began to go Mobile and to shift

from Enterprise ERPs to customer- facing apps, such as Martech and Fintech.

All platforms, today in 2D, will be in 3D

Channels & Markets 4G cellular networks shifted the market from home PCs

to wireless mobile. The big winners were: i) the telecom operators who had a lock-in on both the Mobile and Internet markets, ii) Google and Facebook

who built up the Web Advertising market with their Search and Social Media websites, iii) Amazon of course who created the eCommerce market, iv) Netflix who disrupted the Digital TV market, displacing it from linear TV

broadcasting to direct-to-consumer, app-based Internet streaming, v) Snap and

Tik Tok who carved out the Instant Messaging market. All channels, today running on a highly centralized 5G network, will need to run on a more decentralized 6G network. As for the Metaverse, Meta will continue, by

other means and with less spending, to try to carve out a leading position

in the new Web market, the Next Gen Web market, powered by AR/VR,

in order to serve the next generation of users, the Millennials and the

Gen Z's

2 The New Web Business

What Is The Business? It was Facebook, now Meta, who shook up the Web

market with its Metaverse, showcasing in July 2021 its Horizon Worlds platform,

where users can develop and commericalize their own original digital content, using the easy-to-use "no-code/low code" dev tools it puts online at their disposal.

The huge new market that Meta couldn't miss and that goes well beyond that

for digital content, is what we can call the Consumer-as-a-Business (CaaB)

market, or to use older acronyms, the C2B and C2C markets, complementing what we've only known so far, the B2C and B2B markets. It appears that for

now at least, Meta will develop this new activity within its core social media business (see our Meta case study).

Definition: like any commercial product, a user digital content is anything you

create digitally, i.e. a website, a jpeg image, a video clip, an online game, an

NFT image, for which you've obtained the IP rights and the regulatory approvals

needed to be authorized to put it up for sale online (the digital IP is a digital

signature such as an NFT token and the legal IP is the patent)

The first upstarts to set up the marketing channels, now known as platforms,

to cater to this new CaaB market came from the online gaming world, with

Roblox leading the way beginning in 2006. NFT platforms appeared only a few

years later, beginning in 2009, as extensions of cryptocurrency platforms

which were secured by blockchain, an encryption method dating back to the

70's upgraded for bitcoin (in order to raise barriers to entry, all NFT platforms today only accept blockchain cryptocurrencies for payment)

The Product The final product is of course the digital asset

The Product/Market We have on the one hand the Consumer products

which are catered to the emerging C2B and C2C markets, and on the other,

what we can call the Enterprise digital products which are catered to the B2C

and B2B markets

The Product/Market/Channel There are currently 4 distinct marketing

channels, that is, platforms, serving the above 4 product markets (C2C,

C2B, B2C, B2B)

We first have the NFT platforms which market themselves as blockchain

platforms, and to the extent that blockchain can be used to encrypt both

the digital object (coded by a product encryption key, the NFT token) and

its payment in cryptocurrencies (coded by a payment encryption key, the

FT token), they are also cryptocurrency platforms. They serve, as markeplaces,

all 4 markets. OpenSea, which has processed an estimated $23B worth of transactions since its founding in 2017, is one such NFT marketplace

We then have the Gaming platforms, which use neither blockchain nor

cryptocurrencies but are considered to be NFT platforms (because they also

sell digital objects). They serve all 4 markets. Roblox, launched in 2006, is

one such gaming platform

See our NFT case study for a more detailed explanation of both platforms

We then also have what we can call the Enterprise platforms serving the

B2C and B2B markets. For example, Microsoft has embraced Meta's

Metaverse by adding what it calls Metaverse layers to its existing platforms:

Mesh to MS Office 365 and Connected Space to MS Dynamics. Because it

can tap into its base of 1.5B active Windows and MS Office users, it will most likely move into the C2C and C2B markets

Finally, we have Meta's Metaverse platforms, marketed under its Horizon

brand. See our Meta case study

The Web's New Value Chain

Cloud

Platform

Products

Next Gen Web

Products

Digital

Content,

aka Digital Assets

(original collectible items)

The Network

Website (Domain Name)

Geolocation (PoP)

Data Traffic (Router)

Device (IP Address)

The Equipment

Servers

Devices

Telecom Equipment

Data Storage

Software (Kubernetes)

The People

Developer

Data Analyst

Designer

The Technologies

Application Software

Web Services Software

Hardware & Rel. Software

Open Source Software

see page

ERP

Martech

Fintech

Next Gen Web

Apps

Cloud Infrastructure

(hardware)

The Training

Computer

Science

Electronic  & Telecom

Engineering

eCommerce

Search

Social Media

Next Gen Web

Platform

Cloud Platforms

(software)

Addressable

Market

75B IoT devices

Next Gen Web

Target Markets

Social,

Business,

Retail,

Smart Home,

Smart TV, Gaming,

Fintech

Channels

Apps

Platforms

Products

Markets

The Web's New Product Life Cycle (PLC)

Web Growth

(2022-       )

Creator

Economy

Digital

Economy

The Web

The Next Generation of Web Platforms

(including Meta's Metaverse)

Cloud Growth

(2000-2022)

The Biz