The Lego Era

In an article in today’s New York Times, writer John Markoff says “The Internet is entering its Lego era.” John talks about the rise in componentized software, the rapid pace of development, and the all-important fact that a lot of the innovation is now taking place in small companies and by small, distributed groups of developers working in their spare time. He notes that the cost of development is now so low that traditional venture financing is no longer a prerequisite to building a great product, and further extrapolates that this model may actually obviate the need to outsource development work to low cost producers.

John talks about Amazon’s S3 and about the Mechanical Turk, and about the power that simple protocols like REST (and JSON too, though he didn’t mention it) have to stitch the web’s components together, in what Dion Hinchcliffe is now calling a web-oriented architecture, or WOA.

— Jeff;