O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo

I was at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, I thought about what I saw over the weekend. There seemed to be two Big Ideas at this conference:

1. That applications will move into the cloud/grid/utility, with everybody from Sun, Amazon, and Google to traditional hosting ISPs offering new clout/grid/utility computing solutions.

2. The big players are now moving away from software and software as a service to Platform as a Service. Yahoo, Google, Salesforce.com, Amazon, etc. are all opening up their APIs to turn them into platforms where you can come in and build your own applications on top of them.

What I Think (In Case You Cared...)

I don't think we'll ever move back to the days of dumb terminals and centralized applications run by service bureaus. Nevertheless, I was very excited by what I saw, because by making available both the hardware infrastructure and their platform APIs, the major vendors have just given us even more tools for building better applications.