Ran across this article by Jason over on 37signals.com and found it pretty interesting. He thinks that the “most innovating” software in the future (at least in the next 10 years) will:
- Be Web-based
- Be built by small team
- Be self-funded (as far as the company behind the software)
- Be for “side-businesses” (or at least tiny companies he says is 1-10 people)
He points out that this market is greatly overlooked and people looking to start a side-business want a new type of software that helps them do business without the learning curve of scaled-down enterprise applications or the IT overhead associated with larger packages / non-web software.
I’m hoping that Jason is right on this…that’s one of the motivations behind the small software company I want to have. Although I do have to say I believe the first assetion, that the software will be web-based, is not one I agree with. I can understand what it looks that way, but I really do believe smart clients are the future. Web Apps are certainly getting some amazing capabilities and with browsers supporting more advanced features (although the stuff known today as AJAX has actually been around quite a while – I wrote an application that used VML – which is long gone now – and async web service calls via JavaScript 3 years ago…granted there were some bugs, but it worked…anyway, that’s a bit off topic.). But I see so much potential out there for smart clients. They just provide a much better experience to me. Plus, if your net connection goes down or you are on the road, you can take your data with you…but that’s a discussion for another post. 🙂 Interesting article though…so if you want to build software, keep the side-business market in mind.