Thinking about web apps and innovation

I’ve had some time to digest the App Engine news and think through the possibilities. It’s clear that App Engine is a powerful enabler of web apps of a certain type. Euan has already provided an excellent example, as have others. On the other hand, if you’re someone who likes deploying compute cycle chewing algorithms, tinkering with configurations, etc, you’re out of luck (e.g. Euan mentioned that you couldn’t build an aggregator on App Engine, and you certainly can’t deploy a molecular dynamics app .

I still believe that Google’s goal in this is to own a decent chunk of the web’s stack, allowing developers to plug into their infrastructure as a way of providing them access to its services. On the face of it, nothing wrong with it, assuming the terms of service etc are fair (and continue to remain so). Will you develop serious services on top of the platform today? I don’t know, but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility.

What App Engine embodies is a shift that is prevalent in other areas as well and the results will be similar. It is easy to set up a blog, which means there is some real junk on the web. Similarly building a Facebook app is pretty easy, which again means that there is a ton of junk (one could argue that 98% of the apps on Facebook are completely irrelevant and useless). Ning makes it easy to set up a social network, and apparently pornography is a favorite topic for network builders. The ability to set up a virtual environment on AWS means that a lot of startups that don’t have a good product will come up. Platforms like App Engine, Bungee Labs and Talis are likely to breed some many bad apps. But that should not make us groan (ok perhaps for the Facebook bit). Here’s why

Just as App Engine or Amazon enable some bad products by reducing barriers to entry, they also enable ideas that might never have seen the light of day. They allow a smart fellow like Euan to develop something quickly and share it with the world. They will allow people to develop useful applications and make them available easily for us to use. I certainly would not be thinking about adding “semantic web and Ruby hacker” to my tagline if these wonderful platforms were not around. Yes, I was underwhelmed by App Engine, and yes there is the possibility of bad applications, but if one looks at this at a macro level, we are going beyond what we have achieved over the past few years and that is a good thing

There are two things I hope for. (a) Not everything has to be monetized or marketed. If developing useful apps is easy then making them available as projects to use shouldn’t be a problem in many cases, and (b) life scientists will also make use of these resources, both for cool, geeky projects, but also to build businesses

What about apps that are hard to build, that require you to think through complex algorithms, are uniquely differentiated? As the web app becomes a commodity, those apps will become even more valuable, but deploying them becomes easier than before. It will be interesting to see if our new ecosystem in the cloud enables innovation and creativity or if we just see the same generic web apps all the time.

Image by davemc500hats via Flickr

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