Hope the 2008 holidays were good for everyone. As I start off 2009 I am curious from a design perspective..."What makes a great Internet application?"
This is a more difficult question than first appears. Is it that the application is simple and solves a singular task? Programs like Twitter and Backpack make singular work processes and social communications easier by attacking just that problem and solving it. Does an application have to be large and imposing to be a great application? Do we need our applications to do so many things we might never use them all? Or do we just need a hundred applications that do those 100 things extremely well. I call the latter, the iPhone philosophy. In the iPhone, the platform was developed and little else. Then applications for it sprouted up overnight and a culture was born.
From a business perspective, Salesforce.com has made millions creating a core CRM platform and extending it by offering the ability to connect to it through a freely available development platform. All over the world people and companies are building add-on apps for Salesforce.com making it a super-app that can be used by any industry. If an industry doesn't have coverage, someone can just build an app for it.
In my humble opinion, all apps over the next 10 years will be built on this same philosophy. But is the best of breed approach the best approach? Comments welcome.....
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