Competencies 2.0: A Theoretical Model for Defining and Managing a Presence Plan on the Web

The Web 2.0 Impact On The Economy

First, the Internet's infrastructure suffered a new wave of evolution, in which distributed computers - according to the client-server model - are transferring their contents to the Web, or as it is often called in this context, the Cloud ¹. For businesses in the cloud, connectivity, data security and confidentiality become matters of prime importance, and management of service level agreements with their respective suppliers is taking apart CIOs from their traditional technological profile and converting them in pure service managers. IP technologies provoke huge impact on traditional industries. New giants like Google, Amazon and eBay offer their data centers at very competitive prices to companies around the whole world (Platform as a Service, PaaS). Telecom operators become unusually relevant. Videoconference is putting business travel in serious jeopardy. Software is offered as a remote service (Software as a Service, SaaS).

Second, users find multiple and very easy ways to upload their own contents - and also replicate contents by others - to the cloud, producing a very substantial change on business models based on physical copies with well-known consequences in industries like press media, music, movies or videogames. People have switched the concept of copyright and are firmly committed to share contents in the cloud. Information becomes fully accessible and ubiquitous, ceases to be valuable itself, and is no longer classified by taxonomic but folksonomic² criteria - using labels, or tags, provided by the users.