Everybody knows about the marketplace announcement by google a few weeks back. I was thinking about writing on how pleased I am about it, and finally got some time for it.
It is a wonderful opportunity, especially for small vendors with one or two focused applications or applications targeting a specific audience. Because, you know more have to worry about other big vendors having lot of reputation and applications in their arsenal. With cloud moving towards powerful integrations, every small player have tremendous opportunity. You just have to concentrate on your domain and integrate it well with google and others and immediately all the applications done by google and others will become your own applications and fight for you to win over your competitors.
If you are doing a crm, you know more have to worry about email hosting or campaign management. Just do a plain simple and useful contact manager/SFA and just integrate with other services to make it a full fledged, end-to-end business application. The days of ERP/CRM vendors being everything for everyone and every domain are already vanishing and they will be totally gone soon.
Going forward we can expect lot of standardization in integration and the present lock-in with google itself will be gone soon once other vendors like microsoft, zoho and others provide similar integration opportunity. Only one problem is that these office productivity vendors itself becoming your own competitors and develop applications conflicting with your interest. But in that case, you can always back other vendors that does not have your application. And moreover, with a fine integration and a wonderful application, you can even beat the vendor application itself, even if they are your competitor. If you develop a powerful spreadsheet and integrate with google docs and others then you can even beat google’s own spreadsheet.
You don’t have to build in appengine to integrate with google or azure to integrate with microsoft, you can just choose any platform of choice for building and at the same time integrate with any vendors of your choice. Well, welcome to cloud based integration. It is really an interesting time to be in the field.
One of the motto of google is don’t be evil. But I have feeling that, google is moving in the direction of microsoft, bringing in a monopoly that would severely affect other browsers like firefox and opera and SAS players that compete directly with google over web applications.
Because, with Chrome OS, the browser being the main component, there will not be any scope for browser choice and chrome will be the only browser and all cloud applications will be forced to support chrome better than other browsers and it will eventually lead to the demise of browsers like firefox. And look at the path that google is taking, the support for video, audio and using the full capability of the system in the browser itself is in their future plan and with that the cloud applications will become powerful like native applications and they might even require you to install certain standard basic libraries for functioning properly (MFC/VB core equivalent of native applications) that the Chrome OS will become powerful enough in due course that they will eventually be ported to laptops and desktop.
(Actually I have a series doubt. What actually is the difference between a native applications collaborating over the net whenever needed and a web application with strong offline support and graphics processing, audio, video support. I dont know. Any help on this line is highly appreciated).
There were posts floating around in the net (eg, techcrunch), that Chrome OS is a death blow against microsoft, but it is not at all that. It is going to make microsoft release an IE OS, that contains only IE and with special handling for microsoft’s own web applications. If microsoft has released the IE OS, before google, then that might have created a bad name(monopoly) for microsoft, but now it will just ease their path.
Next is other SAS players. With Chrome OS, giving special privilege to google applications and IE OS giving special privilege, it is going to be hard time for SAS players that compete directly with google and microsoft because a simple link to google docs from Chrome OS is going to considerably reduce the chance for other players providing writer/doc funtionality.
As I was thinking, what to do next in life and what type of company/career to start, one wild idea came to my mind. I was always fascinated by the ancient history of humans and how humans evolved from other species. Though computer field attracted me from the age of 16/17 , right from the age of 10/11, I have remembered starring at the pictures in the human evolution books for the hours in library when others are reading small stories and solving maths problems, but somehow I didn’t pursue a career in it. Even after I was introduced to computers, suddenly some rare days I might spend several hours looking in to the family tree of Egyptian kings or Aztec civilization over the net.
Is it a memory of the pure curiosity of a childhood or an innate interest enough to do it for the remaining period of my life. I don’t know. Did I fully understood, what is it like to pursue a career in it or I was falsely attracted by how it was projected in those books and imaginary films like mummy. I don’t know. Only, one way to find it out. Spend some time in Egypt and excavations sites in Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa.
But all being said, there is one more thing that blockade my mind when I think of pursuing a career in it. Should I study and immerse myself in the human past or should I try to create a future that might inspire the future to look back and learn. But more than right or wrong it is a personal choice and I know, I have to choose the one which will keep me happy. But I couldn’t decide which one. Well, it seems my mind is like a dirty mud pool now and will take some time(may be more) to settle.
Update : Changed the title on friends advice
It’s been five years since I have stepped in to the software field as an employee. Finally the time has come to leave the safe lands and seek the opportunities in this wider world.
I am gonna invest my time, money and my life in doing things my way in order to realize my dream.
This blogs will serve as a medium for expressing myself to the world and I am going to start it by openly analyzing and deciding my next venture.
