The other day I was trying to get some data out of a Google spreadsheet and into a document on a wiki or into Catalyst or somewhere else I could use it in some basic formatted text version – and I couldn’t do it! I thought “how hard can this be?”.
Then I read Joel Spolsky’s Strategy Letter VI – and I thought “right on Joel – can’t happen fast enough for me”.
So if history repeats itself, we can expect some standardization of Ajax user interfaces to happen in the same way we got Microsoft Windows. Somebody is going to write a compelling SDK that you can use to make powerful Ajax applications with common user interface elements that work together. And whichever SDK wins the most developer mindshare will have the same kind of competitive stronghold as Microsoft had with their Windows API.
If you’re a web app developer, and you don’t want to support the SDK everybody else is supporting, you’ll increasingly find that people won’t use your web app, because it doesn’t, you know, cut and paste and support address book synchronization and whatever weird new interop features we’ll want in 2010.
Once again we’ll see that interoperability will be a technology trump card.
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