Netscape founder and serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen started a blog recently. One of his early entries claims there’s no such thing as Web 2.0 and cautions against the use of such vague terms.
Before the “Web 2.0 space”, you had the “dot com space”, the “intranet space”, the “B2B space”, the “B2C space”, the “security space”, the “mobile space” (still going strong!)… and before that, the “pen computing” space, the “CD-ROM multimedia space”, the “artificial intelligence” space, the “mini-supercomputer space”, and going way back, the “personal computer space”. And many others.
But there is no such thing as a “space”.
There is such a thing as a market — that’s a group of people who will directly or indirectly pay money for something.
There is such a thing as a product — that’s an offering of a new kind of good or service that is brought to a market.
There is such a thing as a company — that’s an organized business entity that brings a product to a market.
But there is no such thing as a “space”.