Fear the Penguin
Naval Ravikant (VentureBlog): The New Platforms:
One of the nice things about being in the venture business is that one gets a large number of data points on what the innovative Independent Software Vendors are up to. In particular, it’s interesting to watch what platforms they are developing on, as it is a leading indicator of which one the next killer app might pop up on. Circa 1995, if you were writing mass-market software, you were writing for Windows (client) or Unix (server). Circa 1998, if you were writing software, the server side was Solaris / Unix and the client side was the web browser.
Today, most of the innovative apps are breaking out on many different platforms…
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Predictions – Most killer apps will emerge first via web-based GUIs (client side) unless they involve 3D graphics or heavy filesharing, in which case they’re Win32 apps. Server-side killer apps will more easily emerge on Linux than on Windows. Some of the more interesting consumer-facing server apps are emerging just as quickly on Linux as on Windows (PVRs, online photo albums, music jukeboxes).
Fear the Penguin, indeed.
