There's been a lot of activity in the PaaS space lately. This is
largely fueled by the successful exit of Heroku, and since a lot of
investment tends to be made by looking in the rear-view mirror, a lot of people
are turning their eyes to infrastructure and platforms. These sorts of
businesses haven't been as much in favor lately, and there's more than a
few startup "experts" who have been very critical of
platforms and infrastructure. While it's true that the business models
for these have taken some time to adapt to the era of open source and the cloud, it's
silly to ignore just how much long term value and ROI has come from
these types of companies. Oracle now owns MySQL, there's a lot of ways to look at that, but I tend to view it as both companies won and won big (as did both platforms and closed source and open source, this stuff is nowhere near as mutually exclusive as the pundits would have you believe).
Done with a clear cache and VPN'd into a couple of different locations, but hardly an exhaustive test:
A is for Amazon, B is for Bank of America, C is for Craigslist, D is for DMV, E is for eBay, F is Facebook, G is for GMail, H is for Hotmail, I is for Ikea, J is for Jet Blue, K is for Kaiser, L is for Lowes, M is for Mapquest, N is for Netflix, O is for Outside Lands, P is for Pandora, Q is for Quotes, R is for REI, S is for Skype, T is for Target, U is for USPS, W is for Weather, X is for XBox, Y is for Yahoo, and Z is for Zillow.
Some of these appear to be location dependent, VPN'ing into a server in Los Angeles gives me KTLA instead of Kaiser, Lakers instead of Lowes, Myspace instead of Mapquest, OC Fair instead of Outside Lands.
Lots of people are getting into the weeds of this Oracle/Google/Java spat, it really is little more than a thinly veiled shakedown gambit. But when I look at it as the latest in a string of well publicized disputes between virtually every single major platform owner today and the developers trying to build on those platforms, as well as the major conflicts between potentially competitive platforms, I'm more concerned with the fact that we've recently moved into a new era of aggressiveness and heavy handed behavior by platform owners that we haven't seen since the early 90's. I used to suspect that many of the companies that were the most vocal in decrying Microsoft's dominance back in the day would have behaved no differently than Microsoft if they'd had the ability to do so. Now, when I take a look at the way that every single platform owner of any significance is behaving, I realize that I was wrong, most of them would have behaved far worse.
Note: I'm not using the term "platform" in the way that every company with an API puffs up their chest and tries to claim, but to mean that the company and it's technology have a meaningful ecosystem with a large base of third party vendors, partners, developers, and other participants, all of whom are earning a living (or at least trying to) on top of it. Platforms are ultimately markets, not technologies.
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