Adam Bosworth’s latest post argues that software provided as a service will be more flexible and able to evolve to meet user needs than software distributed to desktops or other scattered environments.
Well this is where the comment about evolution in action comes in. Things that breed rapidly more quickly adopt through natural selection to a changing environment. Services can typically deploy changes every month or even more rapidly because they only have one single configuration on a set of machines whose OS, storage and networking they totally control and which they manage in their data centers. These days Microsoft gives birth to new products at a pace that makes an elephant seem quick, about every 60 months, that means in the time that a service can make 60 adaptions to its customer’s needs, Microsoft makes one. It used to be that they shipped every 12 months. Then 18. Then 24. And so on. The creep is driven by the ever increasiongly complexity of features, hardware, os variations, and backward compatibility of the API’s so ably designed to lock developers in. They locked the developers in all right. The Microsoft ones. This alone to me has been a compelling argument that when a product can be delivered as a service, it should be. [Adam Bosworth’s Weblog: Evolution in Action]
What will the library environment be like in several years time? Will there be a demand for more ‘software as a service’ as the systems environment gets more complex.
