intertwingly

It’s just data

Long Bets

Jerry Cuomo: I see several common threads:

Twenty eight months ago, this bordered on heresy.  And if that didn’t, this certainly did.

Now, it pretty much represents the baseline.  At least for 3 of the 5 (or possibly 4 of the 6 if you count the “subtle” background image).

I’m still hopeful that at some point, people stop being passive consumers of content, and take control over their user experience with tools like GreaseMonkey, but the adoption curve for that and similar technologies seems rather slow, and I don’t see that changing in the near term.

As for continuations, a specialized form, namely closures, is central to Ruby and JavaScript, (and in a somewhat less explicit form: Python), is a part of Groovy, C#, and early exploration is underway for adding closures for Java.

I don’t particularly care whether or not I can count partial credit for that one; and in any case, I certainly didn’t expect to be where we are a mere 28 months later.  But perhaps now would be a good time to look out the next 5 to 10 years.

Five years ago, the state of the art was app silos.  Installing a new application on such a silo was accomplished via drag and drop of a WAR or EAR file.  Now the focus is on Saas.  The apps don’t move, the data does.

The next domino to drop is data silos.  Which if you think about it is a bit ironic.  Just as we move towards desktops with multiple CPU “cores”, and with direct access to terabytes of data storage, we are starting to find the notion that all the data you want is all is one place, all you have to do is form the right query to be increasingly a quaint one.

This makes SQL and components like ActiveRecord the weak link.

So, without further ado, here’s my long bets for the moment, with the only caveat that in some cases I pick specific implementations as exemplars of a larger field.

Yes, I realize that I’ve duplicated one there.  I don’t believe that we have tapped that particular one sufficiently yet.