Mozilla in Asia

Marc Andreesen has a very interesting post about the various “platforms” that are available on the Internet. He categorizes them into 3 levels.

Level 1 he calls the “Access API” and good examples are Amazon Web Services or Flickr or Delicious or any service that has an API.

Level 2 he calls the “Plug-in API” and he uses the examples of Adobe Photoshop, Mozilla Firefox and Facebook. Regarding Firefox and Level 2 platforms he says:

This is the kind of platform approach that historically has been used in end-user applications to let developers build new functions that can be injected, or “plug in”, to the core system and its user interface.
…
More recently, Firefox is well known for having a great plug-in, or extension, API that lets third parties build a wide range of Firefox plug-ins. These plug-ins span functions from blogging to dowloading to search to language translation.

Andreesen goes into a lot more detail on the strengths and weaknesses of Level 2 platforms. He, more than anyone else, knows intimately the strengths and weaknesses of Mozilla.

The Level 3 platform he calls the “Run-time Platform” and he uses the examples of his own new venture Ning, Salesforce.com, Second Life, Amazon EC2/S3, and Akamai.

Andreesen goes on to make some very interesting statements about the future of Internet services that ring true to me:

I believe that in the long run, all credible large-scale Internet companies will provide Level 3 platforms. Those that don’t won’t be competitive with those that do, because those that do will give their users the ability to so easily customize and program as to unleash supernovas of creativity.

I think there will also be a generational shift here. Level 3 platforms are “develop in the browser” — or, more properly, “develop in the cloud”. Just like Internet applications are “run in the browser” — or, more properly, “run in the cloud”. The cloud being large-scale Internet services run on behalf of users by large Internet companies and other entities. I think that kids coming out of college over the next several years are going to wonder why anyone ever built apps for anything other than “the cloud” — the Internet — and, ultimately, why they did so with anything other than the kinds of Level 3 platforms that we as an industry are going to build over the next several years — just like they already wonder why anyone runs any software that you can’t get to through a browser.

The whole post is fascinating and worthy of your consideration.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 6:54 am and is filed under Firefox, plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.