Thursday, September 20, 2007
What Is A Platform?*
Probably, you have read the Marc Andreessen' post about the three kinds of platforms, and the interesting answer from Joshua Allen. If you don't, I recommend both.
First, I don't believe Marc Andreessen is using his argument to advertise Ning. It makes no sense, he doesn't need it. From my point of view, he has an obviously strong conviction about where the platforms should go, and that is the reason why he founded it.
He proposes basically two things: something can be called a platform if you can program it; and that you can classify all the platforms in three levels depending on where the code runs (remote code that uses an API to communicate with the platform, a plugin attached to the platform, an application inside of the platform).
Then, Joshua responded that his analysis has some problems because the data is the platform, not the software. That is clearly part of the vision of Tim Berners-Lee for the semantic web.
But, my question is: is data enough?
I don't think so. I think we need a Marc Andreessen' style platform to make the Joshua's data accessible in a massive and new way for everyone, something very close to the Strategy Letter IV that Joel wrote a few days ago. With that conviction I founded Himalia two years ago, to give the developers something they can program to give their users much more data available, in an easy and interoperable way. This is a very long way, but I am convinced that it is where we should go, because we have the technology to do that.
(*) I added this post to my software redefinition series, What Is A X?. We need to rethink many of the definition of the main concept of our still young industry.
Labels: Himalia, Platform, Software redefinition series, Technology
