October 27, 2005

Joel on eBay / Skype and architecture astronauts

Joel on Software - Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Joel says EBay lost the ability to code new stuff (unlike Google et al), so had to buy their way into new competencies.

He also rants against Web 2.0

I'm happy to be sceptical over the next bubble (though please can I be on it this time?) but I wouldn't dismiss web 2.0 too quickly.

Clearly, there's nothing really new about web 2.0 stuff. It's just a rebranding of what smart people have been saying right all along : that the killer app. of the web is letting people communicate and work together, enabling them to act rather than treating them as a passive consumer demographic.

There's a certain amount of fuzziness, and attempt to squash fashionable but not terribly relevant things (AJAX) into the story. But at least they are talking about what were the good ideas rather than the bad ones.

It is, of course, one of OReilly's manufactured memes like "open source" and "P2P" - the latter of which inspired Joel's original anti-architecture astronaut rant. However, here I don't see any "architecture" claims. There are "patterns", yes, but not the same kind of oversimplified abstraction as P2P.

No comments: