I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Over the last few months we’ve seen a number of significant computing opportunities arrive that provide access to massive markets for new ideas.
Developing applications inside FaceBook was a good first start.
The iPhone SDK is a big game changer. Reports are coming in that the iPhone is the biggest mobile computing browser already. Whatever you think the iPhone is huge and a number of companies are seizing the opportunity.
Today we heard about Google App Engine. This allows you to deploy your application into Google’s server cloud. Just write your code, load it up and promote. This reduces barriers to entry significantly. Amazon has been doing this for a while but what is different about Google App Engine is the that it allows you to link into Google Accounts.
Check out this simple list management program … http://to-done.appspot.com/
You login using your google credentials. So imagine all the little useful applications you can write that leverage that simple logon mechanism.
But looking a bit further out this post from David Recordon nails what gets me excited.
Imagine if Google Accounts added support for the (upcoming) OpenSocial REST APIs. All of a sudden, each of these App Engine sites could start injecting activity and querying for activity across each other.
and
If done right, this really could be the first shipping glimpse of the distributed social web that there is to come.
Winer has some strong thoughts as well - Early notes on GoogleApps
I’m really pissed at Microsoft. Why? They wasted billions on Vista when they should have been virtualizing Windows and making their developers’ investments apply to the net. I know it sounds outlandish, but it really isn’t. Amazon doesn’t offer EC2 for Windows, just Linux. And I’m stuck with two Windows boxes at my hosting company, hosting a dead fucking end. My bet on Microsoft in the late 90s just ran out of gas.
Microsoft is investing big on virtualization, and data centers, so while not at the party yet there will be a big push from them in this space in the next year. There is a lot of .Net code out there waiting for this and .Net developers will demand it. They’re invested and don’t really want to learn a new languages like Ruby, Cocoa or Python.
Regardless, computing is moving away from the traditional ‘build an application over an operating system’ model of past at frightening speed. There is so much opportunity opening up right now as the technology world shifts into this new ‘application in the cloud’ model and incumbents don’t get how big a shift this is.
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I think there is too much hype about all this. I’m not excited about placing all the eggs into one big googley basket. Desktop apps are here to stay, but I hope it won’t the MS ones.
[...] Rod Drury: Platform opportunities Why? They wasted billions on Vista when they should have been virtualizing Windows and making their developers’ investments apply to the net. [...]
Another aspect I found interesting was the tie in with Google Apps and the ability to create apps only accessible to members of your domain. Hence making it suitable for building basic internal facing enterprise apps.
Rod, I don’t see everything moving to the cloud at the same speed as you and others seem to.
I agree with MS vision of software+services.
Given that even Google has not managed to get Gmail out of beta yet and a number of the apps you see from people like 37 Signals I think are quite useless and massively over hyped.
Rather than sticking our food ahopping lists in the cloud I think there are other apps that people could be developing for. One area that I think is under done and possibly over priced at the moment is the unified communications area. While people are in this marketplace I think there is room for some more development.
That is my two pence worth anyway.