Saturday, August 31, 2002

Platforms. If you want a platform to be successful, you need massive adoption, and that means you need developers to develop for it. The best way to kill a platform is to make it hard for developers to build on it. Most of the time, this happens because platform companies either don't know that they have a platform (they think it's an application) or they get greedy (they want all the revenue for themselves.) [Joel on Software] Joel has a few words to say about Groove. [Wrinkled Paper] 1:40:02 PM

Joel on Software: "A free Groove redistributable would mean that hundreds of applications would spring up which would get the runtime spread far and wide. Many of those users would see the value in buying a full version of Groove with built in collaboration features." Do you need to wait for Groove to do this? Maybe something like jabberzilla is the extensible collaborative application platform you are longing for. (I didn't even know about jabberzilla when I started writing up this weblog entry; I just did a quick Google search on Jabber and Mozilla.) I'm not dissing Groove here, but I am goading them. Groove, don't put roadblocks in front of your developers; the infrastructure bits are out there to build ad-hoc Groove-like platforms, so you need to make Groove as accessible and extensible as possible. [Brian Jepson's Radio Weblog] 1:39:19 PM

© Copyright 2002 Sam Gentile.