You’ve said what I’m trying to say , better than I did

Major factor in the rollout of this is not so much technical (you’ve already proved it more or less works) but trust – and we’ve a long way to go on this one.

Paul

P.S. Hope Wellington is treating you well. Miss the Wine Bar on the corner of Boulcott Street, but not the frequent earthquakes.

Some questions I have arising though are:

is this Monaghan’s year for the GAA final?

more on topic though, I’ve recently built a commercial site that makes heavy use of Google Maps.

Nice API, didn’t cost us a bean. Yet.

My CEO said to me – what happens if Google decide to charge? I said we weigh up the cost of the alternatives at that time, and make the best decision then, and hope it doesn’t break us financially.

Point being – I can’t see the big bank I work at during the daytime, who have me trucking out fairly ordinary Java based business web apps that could easily leverage Google APIs et al, ever saying – “we’ll worry about that liability later”.

I think, from their point of view, the most risk averse and possibly cheapest option in the long run is to have me write all of it in house now. Sure Google have written a spreadsheet app, but _we_ don’t control it, and we can’t have our business balls in someone elses pockets.

Does anyone have any thoughts about how palatable it will ever be for corporates to rely on other corporates not changing the costs involved?

If everyone used Google API, then Google have a massive monopoly, which calcifies over time… ‘don’t be evil’ notwithstanding, what do corporates typically do with massive monopolies?
They milk them for every last penny.

One last question – will your CEO like having ‘(c) Google’ and possibly some adwords selling her who knows what keywords might have triggered, every time she looks at the app’s front end?

Again bravo for not only asking the big question, but being thick skinned enough to ask it again

I think that you’re making sense if you’re only considering cases where the development of software, more often than not, amounts to merely stringing pieces of functionality together. I’d argue that those cases are few and far between, for now anyhow.

…and then there’s the dependency management

‘That definitely is not possible’. Are you sure? Do you mean ‘not possible now, but may be possible later’?

You’re in a good niche with the manufacturing and product management domain.

However, what’s to stop SAP offering online services, with people like you customising the final 10%? If you’re offering customisation (rather than building from scratch) , what’s the best / quickest language to do it in?

Are you really sure it’s Java? Me, I don’t know.

Paul

Recently one or two people disagreed with what I had to say about the impact that the Google (and other) API’s will have on Java. Considering the ratio of positive to negative comments (about 3 for and 30 violently against),……