Web 2.0 and the next generations of software

Tim O’Reilly must be reading me :wink:.

In his article What Is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software he lays out, in a deeper and more elaborate way, what I sketched in my previous article, the Google way.

By comparing the cases of Netscape and Google, Tim O’Reilly clarifies the path taken by Google, and by all the new applications to come, in the so-called Web 2.0

Netscape saw the web as a platform under the old paradigm of software distribution. Its main application was the browser, a desktop application; by dominating that market, it could establish a market for web servers at a high price. Netscape wanted to displace the desktop with a webtop, which would deliver content to users, all generated by content providers running Netscape servers.

What happened?

The browser and the server became commodities; their value went to zero. Not only because Microsoft gave away the browser, but because the open source revolution left Netscape without the product that was supposed to generate its profits, the web server. Most web servers are Apache.

Google, on the other hand, started out as a web application, one that isn’t sold, that was never packaged; it didn’t follow the patterns of traditional software.

There are no release dates, just continuous improvement of the applications, an almost eternal Beta state.

I quote O’Reilly:

Software licensing and control over APIs–the lever of power in the previous era–is irrelevant because the software never need be distributed but only performed, and also because without the ability to collect and manage the data, the software is of little use. In fact, the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage.

As we can see, the web is changing in a way that all of us who develop software need to start understanding. The old world of licensing must be forgotten. The fight between open source and closed source is over; programs are irrelevant, what matters is the result, not how you get there.