The Developer’s Pit

For me it all started back in 1998. I helped co-found a company called CyBook Inc, with three good friends; one of them is my wife, who since than decided to follow other venues, another currently works as JAJAH VP R&D and the last one runs his own freelance business now. We teamed up with an energetic fellow from the ‘Silicon Valley’ and together started to follow our dream: create a device that will replace printed books. While the topic of electronic books is interesting (and I will probably return to this in future blog entries) I wanted to focus on one of the three slogans I learned during the short livelihood of CyBook: "Brave New World" (BNW), "Not Invented Here" (NIH) Syndrome and "Customer Is King".

When I proceeded to my next venture, the concept of "Customer Is King" crystallized and formed our way of thinking, especially since we were in the Internet consumer business. Few years passed during which I closely witnessed the struggle of the titans: Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, and understood what makes Microsoft different than the rest of the pack: Developers, Millions of them, anywhere around the globe: so many people sitting around, hammering their keyboards, writing software on, with or for Microsoft environments. It is the developers who wheel the industry; not only the customers who consume the services and products we make.

When Google released “Android” a few weeks ago, I was puzzled and started to look deeper into both the platform and their motives. It was than that I realized that the industry focus has changed: we are no longer the knights who say "Customer Is King", we are now the nights who say "Developer Is King".

The era of API’s is here.

The new battle ground of the giants is now Mobile platforms and Google realized that the only way to sway around Microsoft strength is to attack their core: the developers’ community. "Go back to the source" say the Architect(s) at Google while releasing more API’s and trying to convert Microsoft developers into Google developers. It is not a coincidence in my mind the Google released two different development platforms nearly simultaneously: "Open Social" for the social network applications and "Android", a new Linux based platform for Mobile development.

It is without doubt that many companies are putting a lot of effort into releasing more and more API’s and putting more and more emphasis on the developers’ community - Developer is King.

 

Amichay

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 7:06 pm and is filed under My Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.