When social media hit its stride a decade ago, the Web 2.0 term was coined and flew around like crazy. It was heady days when everyone thought the entire nature of how the internet was changing. The reality was far more mundane, new technologies added features and functionality but not much fundamentally changed. The real story from this was the rise of “2.0” to mean a revolutionary change.
Don’t get me wrong, web 2.0 wasn’t the first instance of 2.0 implying revolution. But largely before that, 2.0 was just an upgrade on 1.0 just like 4.0 was an upgrade on 3.0. It was simply a counter. Now, any company looking to show how much they are changing things up slaps a 2.0 on their processes and rolls out the PR bandwagons.
There are generally two types of products:
- Products that receive notable updates and upgrades. This could include software applications and technology hardware. It’s easy to define and understand the upgrade cycle around these. Every year, cellphones get better and a new version can get an upgraded counter.
- Products that receive incremental/ad hoc updates and upgrades. This includes most services, SaaS systems. Anything that a person does manually shouldn’t be branded 2.0. That manual process evolves over time and even big “advances” and “improvements” are just evolutionary. “Peggy” is still doing the job. SaaS systems push out their upgrades as they are available, there’s no next version. It simply is what it is.
Neither of these categories deserves a big branded 2.0. The first will have a 3.0 round in good time. The second should be including changes all the time of varying degrees, there’s no opportunity for a 2.0 dividing line.
Quit with the marketing gimmicks and just get the job done.