Is The Future of Web Services in Question?
A recent post on www.networkworld.com referring to net Guru Carl Zittrain’s recent book predicts the death of the Net by tethering it to locked-down devices such as the iPhone. The security fears and hassles of spam are quoted as pushing the regular user towards heavily protected devices and workstations, and Zittrain argues that this movement will stifle the innovation and entrepreneurship that has made the web what it is.
While this is likely true, I believe that we’re also likely to see business consolidation online which will lead to greater consistency of web services for business users.
While much of the innovation and creativity of the internet has come from it’s unregulated and ad-hoc nature, the strength of a business paying for the development of a functional and useful piece of technology can’t be ignored, and as the iPhone itself has proven, you can’t underestimate the power of the hacker community in effecting real change on a new piece of technology. At the end of the day, competitive advantage does and will always come to some extent from innovation, and whether that innovation originates from inside or outside the firm is irrelevant.
While there is and will continue to be strong tension between the drive for flexibility and the drive for consistency and safety in our information technologies, I don’t believe that this is a threat to the innovative and creative nature of the business. Creative and innovative people will continue to work through and around boundaries, and when there is value to be found in their frontier work the powers that be, always on the lookout for an edge over their competitors, will pick up the ideas and bring to them the stability necessary for the masses. In essence, there will still be a balance, and it will be expanded to include the web services that go along with integrated mobile devices.
The proliferation of the new wave of integrated mobile devices is creating a huge number of ‘normal’ users who will drive the market for consistent and stable utilities on mobile devices. This is good news for businesses, who typically require a higher level of dependability and protection in their information systems. Businesses will be able to integrate these new devices into their systems with a much higher degree of safety than has been present in the past.
In summary, the proliferation of integrated mobile devices will serve to increase the reliability of the web services that complement them, which business will be able to harness. Despite the locked-down nature of these devices, the innovation and creativity of the online world will not be comprimised. The new world of work must and will embrace this revolution.
Posted by summarymakers 