One of the fun things about technology disruptions is trying to figure out what the landscape will look like after the main event. It's those changes that nimble businesses can take advantage of to pivot into the new spaces that were created. For example when the Web finally went mainstream it created an entirely new industry, but it then proceeded to change the way every other existing industry operated to some degree, and we're still working through that with things like hosted applications and the SaaS model.
Conversation-Centric Communications
I've been doing a lot of thinking about the impact of a conversation-oriented communications model on application architecture, and the concept of software applications in general. A week or so back I wrote that this was one of the most important bits of the Wave architecture: the way they modeled a conversation in which the idea of a participant is malleable.
It seems like a forgone conclusion that all applications which require use by more than one person will move to this model sooner or later. Just as SaaS apps are becoming mainstream, the game is changing, and the more nimble companies have an opportunity to pivot into a brand new space which is right now being created by this disruption.
While it's fun to talk about these things in the conceptual sense, I think it's more practical to get down to brass tacks and figure out the specifics as much as possible. Here are a few things that I've come up with so far, would be interested to see if anyone else can add to this list:
- Applications will be much less visible. By being participants in a conversation it's natural that applications would work within the existing conversation environment, extending it where necessary. The measure of an application's user-friendliness will now be how well it integrates into a conversation. The days of going to a distinct URL to use software are numbered.
- Service applications will grow like wildfire. Some applications no longer need an interface at all, you will simply add them to the conversation and they will do things in the background. For example, adding a text analysis service to a conversation would only require adding it to the conversation, along with its output. Twitter has shown some of this potential, but only the amount that's allowed by its restrictive architecture, API, and medium–that is, not much. You can count on every Twitter application being rewritten to watch conversation hubs.
- Applications will be seen more as components, or capabilities, than distinct and unique units of software. Because of the lack of a need for an extensive user interface, and the fact that deployment is as simple as adding an application to a conversation, the very idea of what software is morphs into a capability that you add to your communications rather than software that you purchase and download, or sign up for and
- True object-oriented applications will become a reality. Call me archaic, but I hate the current MVC architecture that we're stuck with to get around the limitations of the disconnected Web. It sucks; sorry, face it. With all applications effectively on the same message bus now, and sockets in the browser with HTML5, and linked data on the back-end, true distributed object-oriented programming in the client is closer than you think. Praise God.
- The conversation container will become the new AppStore. Adding capabilities to a conversation requires that you be able to find that software and import it into the conversation. The conversation container is king in this respect. There's a big potential here for conversation containers to displace the iTunes App Store as the hottest new software distribution channel. I would be shocked if Google isn't already looking at this–if they have the pre-eminent conversation container then they have an opportunity to displace Apple in the App Store business.
I'm still chewing on this list, but this is what I've come up with so far. There's definitely more, especially in the online identity area, but I'm still digesting that.
All in all I think this is certainly a larger number of disruptions than all but a few people out there are expecting. The first domino is falling, and now it's just a matter of looking at where it's going to fall.
