The world of software development is changing… there I have said it. Going with the thesis that “Software is going to Eat the World“, I believe it is important to give context to this notion. I started writing code a long time back, I am a closet geek i.e I like to make things and the command line does not scare me. I have seen the evolution of software development, adopted and been a pilgrim to a few religions only to learn that the market dictates which religious camp you should be part of. If you are with me so far then you understand what is going on in the software world. Lets continue on the context part, today everything that we do involves something to do with Software, you mobile phone, the car you drive, TV programs you are watching and how you get electricity into your home. Given the broad application of software, it is important to know that today the world of software is hyper connected i.e Software written in one environment talks to software written in another environment with small tweaks through what is called Application Programming Interfaces (API), the interoperability brings with it a huge network effects. This is not a universal phenomena because there are still those who believe that writing software that does not talk anyone who wants to talk to it is a viable business strategy, I think that camp is going to die… if you are working for a software company and your software product or service does not have an API, run to the hills because you will become the North Korea of the new world. I see you are still reading this post, which tells me that software is important to you, good.

I had interesting meetings with some software companies who still believe that they need to build walled gardens of applications that don’t interoperate with the external world through standard APIs. I pity those who think that way. In today’s world Open Transparant API is the currency because it expands your reach and product base and partnership. If your company’s value proposition is not tied to being open and interoperable, you are dead out of the door. The Open Source movement has spawned an army of software some that I use and would like to contribute to and others that I would not recommend to my mother. There is a wide chasm between what is usable and what is full of crap… that is the cost of open source, never the less the biggest value of open source is adoption and expanded ecosystems.  Internetis the largest ecosystem we have today and it is evolving it is built on open source, standards based API.

This image was selected as a picture of the we...

This image was selected as a picture of the week on the Farsi Wikipedia for the 13th week, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Another new movement is the ability to have access to server environments at a negligible cost compared to what it was 10 years back. Today anyone can sign up with a Cloud Provider like Amazon Web Services or GreenQloud (disclaimer: I am the CEO of GreenQloud and the entire stack of software that runs on GreenQloud is built using Open Source software and the team has contributed a lot to the open source community through Cloud.com) and spawn a server environment, build an application and launch it on the internet and start selling it. All this has been made possible by Open Source software and Standard based API and the Internet. You don’t have to buy software you may still need to install some software in the server environment but for those who know what they are doing it is pretty straight forward. So, startups today when they say they need to buy Hardware ie. Server computers, it better have a compelling reason. Many of the standard services we use today are running in the Cloud, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, DropBox etc even Apple has a cloud offering called iCloud and Microsoft is following that strategy is launching their own versions of cloud services Office365.com, outlook.com, Skydrive etc to name a few. This new world is here to stay, there is no turning back, are there going to be hiccups along the way absolutely… I have no doubts but this hyper connected world with Services available through all the devices we carry and have on us is huge step forward. As we all like to say you have seen nothing yet!

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