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What took a full year to achieve in the past now takes only a month. In the IT era, the 1990s are a long time ago. A memory from that historic time is the rivalry among word processor software developers. Lee Chan-jin, dubbed the "Bill Gates of Korea", made a great success of his Hangul software, and other software makers followed suit to develop word processor software of their own. As a result, domestic and foreign word processor software makers such as Papyrus, Saimdang, AmiPro, Gulsarang, and Arirang -- companies whose names nobody now remembers -- competed fiercely with each other. A few years later, almost all of them were gone. Only Microsoft Word and Hangul managed to survive, and the word processor market ceased to exist.
Fast-forward to early 2007. Most Internet businesses declared the advent of what we here call the ¡°UCC¡± era, short for ¡°user-created content¡± and meaning essentially self-made video clips. Many companies decided they would advance into the ¡°UCC¡± market, or step up services if they already had, amid rumors that the results of this year's presidential election will be determined by UCC. It is still too early to jump to a conclusion, but what is certain is that none of the many UCC service firms have turned any huge profits yet. Moreover, there is no evidence that UCC is having a decisive impact on the presidential election campaign either. Unless things change drastically, the crowded field of UCC services, under pressure from copycats, high network fees and criticism of substandard content, will end up as a fad, not a trend.
Copycatting devastated Korea's Internet industry in the early 1990s, and copycatting is still undermining the industry today. On a rumor that some business looks promising, everybody thrusts themselves into it, and many steal other people's ideas and use them as their own.
Let's take the example of Twitter, a fad in the U.S. where users can post one-liners about their views on various topics on the Internet or mobile phones. By now there are seven or eight similar service providers in Korea, introducing themselves as "microblogs." Even some powerful Korean mobile service providers are not above looking for a slice of the market.
There is more. After social networking services like MySpace and Facebook became hugely popular in the U.S., about 10 Korean businesses started similar services. And the moment rumor had it that metablogs looked promising, a dozen Korean firms started their own metablog services.
The Korean Internet industry is in crisis. At one point in the past, international players wanted to benchmark Korean services: massive multiplayer online role playing games or MMPORG, Cyworld, and Knowledge iN, which were developed by leading Korean venture firms. But the Korean firms soon forgot how to develop such innovative Internet technologies, and got overwhelmed by gigantic portal sites like Naver and Daum at home while performing poorly in overseas markets.
Korea has already been overtaken by Japan and other countries in terms of the super-speed Internet infrastructure, which we once took credit for leading. Korean businesses are busy copying other people's ideas instead of developing innovative technologies of their own. It feels like a the death knell of the Korean Internet industry.
This column was contributed by Hwang Soon-hyun from the Chosun Ilbo's Internet News Desk.
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