Web 3.0 Anyone Can Innovate

Just catching up on my blogs and I found this really interesting article on TechCrunchIT thanks to Michael at Salesforcetimes.

Basically this is a guest article written by the maverick himself; Marc Benioff. Long story short:
Web 1.0 was about getting businesses and people online to ‘transact’ or lookup information. Web 2.0 was about getting users involved in the process. Getting users to blog, upload/tag pictures, Digg pages and contribute to wikis. Although each wave operates in an overlapping and simultaneous manner, Web 3.0 is emerging on the horizon.

Marc explains that Web 3.0 is about leveling the playing field for developers. Web 1.0 was the mainframe era and Web 2.0 was the PC era. Web 3.0 is going to be the era of cloud computing. We’re going to see much more non-technical people build and release ‘technology’. Since the underlying plumbing and infrastructure is being provided by services such as Force.com and Amazon, developers can now concentrate on business logic, usability and the ‘killer app’ (interesting, that’s what many people promised with J2EE). Not only will cloud computing enable more and more developers, it will also lower the barrier to entry for companies of all sizes. We’ll be able to find smaller more specialized ISV’s because anybody can develop on the cloud as long as they have a PC. I have even heard of a university student paying their way through school by providing customization services for Salesforce.com customers!

I really agree with Marc. I think if somebody wants to make it big in the next wave of the web it’s going to be about building apps on the cloud. I remember my economics prof Larry Smith once told us, “Go to the workplace, find some inefficiency that costs your company a lot of money but can be solved with software. Once you find it, quit and start a business around solving that inefficiency.” Today with the emergence of Platform as a Service, that door of opportunity could never be opened wider.

Source: warriorpoint.com