Benjamin Jörissen's Bookmarks tagged economy →  View Popular

What we have seen in the last few years is a quiet but dramatic shift in the stack. Sure the LAMP stack and variants are still there but the stack now looks more like three really, really big layers:





1. Applications (as always) on top


2. Programmable Web - libraries and APIs - in the middle



3. Hardware As A Service (Amazon, Google, others) - at the bottom with all the traditional stack components.

The key lesson for entrepreneurs is that the programmable web enables you to pick and choose. It did not use to be like that. You had to choose IBM or Univac on mainframes, DEC or HP in minicomputers, Windows or Unix in Client/Server. Each decision had far-reaching consequences. You were really locked-in.

That is no longer true in the programmable web. You can use Amazon web services, Google Web Toolkit, LAMP stack from Red Hat, YouTube for videos and any number of specialized APIs. The power to create sophisticated, complex web based systems has grown exponentially.