Om Malik started an interesting conversation about Google's My Maps with a blog post that said: Google MyMaps Smashes Mash-ups. David Galbraith expanded on that with The Day Web 2.0 Died, and Om responded with Web 2.0: End of Innocence.
To put it crudely, if you're a start-up based on the Google Maps interface, Google just blew up your business model. It's a bit like the companies that added utilities to Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X only to see them incorporated into the operating system.
In the long run, it probably doesn't change anything except people's perceptions of what's going on. So I think Malik has got it right: it's not so much the end of Web 2.0 as the end of innocence, insofar as there are still any innocent venture capitalists around.
The real (but not really new) point is that the issue isn't specific to start-ups using Google or Amazon or someone else's Web 2.0 offerings, it's about competing with Google. As Valleywag points out:
Once upon a time, venture capitalists would avoid software startups that looked likely to compete at some point with Microsoft. It's now Google, the new tech power, that is having the chilling effect.
The Google giveth; it taketh away.
