Madz signing in…

Got to hear a very interesting comment the other day.. It was “Programming is now a commodity”..

Of course it was not quoted by someone very knowledgeable about the topic and must have been the result of a CYA approach, but delving over it, it does start painting a picture and it may not turn out to be very pretty overall..

Agreed, programming is still the Holy Grail for all the quality products and services that you see out there. But the power today lies not in the quality of the number cruncher lying under the hood but rather in the quality of the data produced as a result. And the real killer deal today is the ability to string together multiple sources of data together (more or less in a loosely coupled manner) to generate new platforms for the sharing of information and services.

As a result, you see a killer application in FaceBook that allows you to share anything you want under the sun through widgets and Flickr that allows you to build up a prolific community based on images, image capture devices and image locations. Linking of relevant data sources was always around by means of makeshift workflow models adopted enterprise-wide. But with the emergence of a global community generating meaningful content on a daily basis, there was the natural need to take this out of an organizational perpective to a global one.

Enter Indigo (refer .NET 2.0) by Microsoft which is essentially a programming platform/model that drills into you that no binary code out there is an island anymore and every binary code out there is a potential service. Indigo allows you to build connected services on the fly and would automate to a large extent the ability to expose your application as a service thus allowing it to be consumable by anyone who might be able to link it with another source of relevant data to create that killer application that is now looming in the horizon.

Hence, while the laying the business rules into practice still essentially belong to the domain of the premium programmer, the eventual monetization in terms of scale and volume to a bigger audience is now becoming very much a commodity.

Madz signing off….