January 22, 2008

Dave's interesting take on commodification ... it's gonna put prima-donna developers out of business?

I'm not sure I totally buy the idea that people will put more of their data up for themselves. In a recent chat with Folknology we were discussing who would be the natural company to bring customers directly into the cloud. Ie. who would resell Amazon et al's commodity infrastructure and storage as non-exploitative way of managing your online identity (as opposed to evil Facebook, Microsoft or Google who want to own your online identity and relationships in order to resell you.)

Perhaps blog-software providers like Six Apart or Wordpress? Perhaps EBay who already controls some important information about your trustworthiness? Although Amazon provide this infrastructure, it seems like there's a conflict of interest with them wanting to sell to you.

Ironically, it may be that this conflict of interest makes it especially hard for a web 2.0 internet playa ... anyone too closely associated with an advertising funded model seems suspect. Anyone too closely associated with data-mining, collaborative filtering or Amazon-style "users who bought this also bought ..." are suspect.

Outside speculation ... could it be Apple who have the genius to create a slick iMe device they can sell to you, containing your electronic identity and social network, tethered to an always on phone system? (Perhaps in the form of a little voodoo doll, that has your face. :-) ...

Or some other name more closely associated with personal communication than online networks? Actually, could Microsoft would be in with a chance if they promoted it as the next development of Outlook rather than try to make it part of some grand everything-under-one-Live-umbrella scheme.

Remember ... the user is the platform.

3 comments:

chad said...

sun should compete with amazon, they are a perfect fit from a vision and skillset standpoint.

i doubt gyme will do it right, they want to own "eyeballs" and no startup is going to build on a platform where they know the platform owner might decide to eat their lunch any day.

also...hosted databases already exist. how hard is it for existing hosting companies to do a bit more work on their scaling / service story and compete here???

Composing said...

interesting ... I guess some hosting companies will try to get in on it ... maybe it requires some clever extra software to manage that the ordinary hosting companies don't have the ability to write, although if someone makes that software available ...

chad said...

the question i really have is whether this extremely limited programming model (map reduce etc.) that google, ebay etc. are using will be way web developers move towards. my very limited understanding here is that there is a very reduced set of operations that say the amazon simpledb provides versus the sql syntax that a modern sql server provides. and that is imposed because of the limitations of using a bunch of commodity machines for a high-scale website which means a lot of replication and limited parallelism.

my market conclusion is that current hosting works pretty well for most. almost no apps need to serve as many users as google.com / yahoo.com / amazon.com. only a startup developer or someone with a lot of traffic currently with hopes that their app will take off (i.e. twitter) would need to worry about scalability up to very high levels. but i guess its something that will become a given for hosting companies to keep up. its unclear to me though that someone building say a small scale database driven web app for their department would ever want to worry about such things. ideally some hosting co would give you the full LAMP without requiring learning some weirdo APIs. can mysql be mapped onto simpledb?