:: The death of the application - Part I ::

A good friend of mine is looking for an idea for a start-up. He has the money, he has the know-how. Now he just needs an idea. He sounded off some of the ideas he had to me. They were all 'infrastructure' ideas. How to make this faster, how to make that more efficient and stuff like that. I asked him - what about a nice application? Something which people could actually use?

"Hmmm" he said. "Nobody does applications any more. Microsoft does them all". This is so true. Try to think of the software you're using today at work. Software which your company paid for. Most chances are that 99.9% of it is Microsoft software. Other than Anti-Virus software, graphics software (Photoshop, Freehand), maybe 'ghost', and if you're big enough - Lotus Notes. The rest - is pure Microsoft. Your OS, you're browser, your mail application, your word processing, your development environment (remember we used to have Borland?), probably your source-control. Even your Visio is now owned by Microsoft.

Now, this is not going to be one of those Microsoft-Bashing pieces. Microsoft did what it had to dominate the application market, so - whoopie for them.

No, this time its going to be how no one is developing applications anymore.

Wadi Writer # 3 (Maroon)
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