Something big is in play, and it will transform the entire software ecosystem over the next 5 years. The changes will be so dramatic that the current discussions of a bubble will appear silly. Huge companies will fail and even bigger new companies will be formed.
The fundamentals of the era we are at the birth of have the following characteristics:
- Desktop: desktop computing devices, including laptops, are being reduced to machines that are used to perform serious work tasks. Less people will buy them in future, and those who do will use them less of the time.
- Web 2.0: software written for the Web 2.0 era, assuming services in the cloud are consumed by people sitting at desks with browsers, will be increasingly less relevant and used less often.
- Mobile: mobile devices, and especially smart phones, will accomplish more and more of the things an individual will want to get done, and will do so more easily and productively.
- Thin cloud: software and services will run on these devices and use the cloud for storage and delivery. Rich clients will use a thin cloud. The cloud will get bigger but simpler.
- Apple: apple’s iPhone architecture is best suited to this emerging human experience.
- Google: google’s Android, being mainly a thin client to Google’s thick cloud (Docs, Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Picasa, G+) will please geeks but will need to change to be the mainstream choice of discerning consumers.
- Facebook: facebook, the archetypal thick cloud ecosystem, will be very vulnerable during this transition as almost its entire business relies on a cloud based architecture holding a person’s social graph and being the means of acting on that graph.
- Mobile only: anybody building almost anything in 2011 should be thinking “mobile first” and possibly “mobile only”.
via Techcrunch
