The Coming Developer Wars

We (Maryam, Patrick, and I) had a wonderful breakfast with Microsoft's Windows Live Local service. You know, Microsoft's Mapping Service (why can't they name things simply at Microsoft? If I could figure that one out I'd probably be running marketing). On his nights and weekends he also does the very cool Brown Bag Cafe in Redmond (our favorite breakfast place) we got in a creative mood and we started throwing around ideas of things we'd like. That's not the important thing I took away from this conversation, but listening to how a developer thinks when in a creative conversation is very interesting. One idea he threw out was that he wanted to crawl all the blogs, look for commonalities, then spit them back to a box that I'd put on my blog. Something like Amazon's "1) They need a freaking fast distribution platform. Er, a set of server farms around the world. Why? Well if that little Internet component that Chandu's thinking of slows down my blog I'm going to get rid of it. And so will every other user around the world. Delivery speed is job #1 in this new world. It better work in London, Chennai, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Cape Town, the same way it does in San Francisco. 2) They need a s*load of storage space. Yes, that's a technical term. : ) You try crawling 100 million blogs and see what kind of index it builds for you. Let's just round up to "a terabyte." Can you afford to buy a terabyte in storage space to scratch your developer itch? Chandu can't. 3) They need an API. Something simple to spit data in, and suck data out. REST seems to be the one of choice lately. 4) It needs to be cheap. Um, free if possible. At least if you want Chandu to be able to build it, deploy it, and have it survive its first exposure on DIGG. If Chandu starts making revenue then you can get him to give you a cut, but the startup costs need to be near zero so that the developer "itch" can be scratched. Guys like Chandu (and most of the other geeks I know) don't have much money to buy access to services. What was Chandu's first impulse at breakfast? To use Microsoft. Microsoft has a huge number of developers but those developers are skilled at building Visual Basic apps for businesses. They don't think a lot about the Web. The ones who've decided to spread their wings generally switch over to a Google mindset instead of switching over to a Microsoft mindset. But, Microsoft can always get back in the game. They are investing big time in both marketing initiatives (Mix, Channel 9, On10.net) and have some really interesting stuff coming. While at breakfast Lenn Pryor. Seriously what they have is the largest buying and selling community out there. And they have Skype, which hasn't made sense yet. But, Skype built a great P2P system. What's the hardest thing for developers to do? Get huge amounts of data around the world without paying for it. Hmmmm, if the dev team that did Skype could do something innovative here that would absolutely rock. But, let's assume that the Skype team isn't gonna do anything. Well, eBay still has learned a TON about keeping its Web system up and running. That wouldn't be hard to turn into a set of services that developers could use for other purposes. My money? It's on Google. Why? Cause I go back to the developers. Right now they are more likely to use Google's stuff than any other - you should see how developers and geeks talk about all these companies. So, unless Google does something evil to piss developers off, or don't deliver the long-rumored GDrive soon, it's their game to lose. That said, don't bet out the other players. They are all trying to figure out where the value will come in this chain. Anything I haven't thought about? How do you see the coming Internet Developer Wars playing out? Update: Omnidrive) that are doing the same thing, but are shipping now. Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Bookmark Murdok: Scobleizer blog. He works as Scobleizer