Contragts to Caterina on getting Bizwerk started! If requests from the audience are being accepted, I'd like some thoughts on Marc Andreessen's remarks reported here (found on John Battelle's blog, pin-poked by Jeff Jarvis):

... we now have 10 times more people on the Internet now than we did five years ago. We've got 10 times or a hundred times more broadband. We've got Internet advertising, which is a real phenomenon. We have a whole generation of citizens now used to doing business online, used to buying things online, and used to communicating online.

On the technology side, we've had over that period about a 10 times reduction in price in a lot of components that go into building the Internet and building services on the Internet, like servers and software and networking equipment.

All that's really adding up. The economics of the Internet have undergone something like a thousand-times swing. If you're going to launch an Internet site or an Internet business today, it's probably going to cost about a tenth of what it would have cost five years ago, but you're going to have 10 times more consumers you can address and probably 10 times the advertising revenue. There's a seriousness and commitment and dedication and effort and investment going into it now that is a lot more interesting and a lot more real than what was happening in the '90s.

Though I'd quibble a little of the factors there, and add in a minus along the lines of there being at least 10 times as much competition (balanced by another plus, being the reduction in the complexity/mysticisum on the development side and the availability of people who know what they're doing), the point is well taken. There are a ton of opportunities now that were not viable five years ago.

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