Wither Widget

Pando Daily has a good piece about the great promise, and ultimate disappointment, of widgets. It's good to go back and reflect on a thing they everyone was going to go one way and ended up going another:

Even Valley sage Marc Andreessen* told BusinessWeek in 2007, “The big widgets have the potential to become the new networks.” And I don’t mean to pick on Andreessen — Quincy Smith and Meg Whitman are both quoted in that article too, as is Vinod Khosla who said, “Widgets are a fundamentally important idea. I believe it has the potential to create big billion-dollar winners.” The smartest people in the Valley had plenty of company on this one.