One Computer

Thomas Watson from IBM said that he could foresee a need for perhaps five computers worldwide, and we now know that that figure was wrong, because he overestimated by four. - Clay Shirky

There is only one computer in the world now, and that computer is the World Wide Web. Developers must know that, understand that and believe that.

Software does not matter unless it is written to run on that one computer. Know that too.

I have been saying this for awhile now, and some people have had some trouble understanding what I mean. I am not saying that the only thing that is to be written must be web applications. What I am trying to say is that if you are writing software it must be able to be used by applications and software that does run on the Web.

If your software does not, then it will simply be ignored. That's not malicious or intended as a criticism of your code, I'm sure it's very good. Think about it this way: as OS/2 faded away any software that only ran on OS/2 simply stopped mattering. This is just happening again, except all operating systems are fading away, replaced with that one computer.

So, if you have some amazing idea for writing some beautiful video processing code in the current functional-language-of-the-moment, you must have a plan for making that code useful to the web otherwise no one will ever use your code.