Power to the People

In my old age it will be nice to watch as a younger generation of enthusiastic people build powerful applications out of tools provided for them on the internet. And as they do so right from their browser.

The early nineties showed lots of promise. But things looked pretty grim there for a while as Windows continued to dominate and gobble up the arena of "serious" applications.

But today we've got easy web publishing and customization--only a few years ago the exclusive domain of the "web programmer"--now routinely performed by people with blogs and custom home pages. Over the past few years, many creative uses of Google Maps have popped up. Most recently we've got Yahoo Pipes. Don't forget infrastructure services like Amazon's S3.

Etlos CRM for Google might be the most striking example I've seen recently. Maybe because I've been through the whole "buy a really expensive CRM system" thing before. And I am pleased to see people taking the initiative to build a simple solution to the problem.

The various tools on the Internet have reached a critical mass of functionality, customization, community ownership, and APIs that transform it into a platform rather than just a communication network.

But don't worry. This video on OSX Leopard's Core Animation reminds us that us geeks will still have a job programming local hardware too.