Independent web developers build business “on the shoulders of giants”

Whatever a large Internet corporation, be it Google , Yahoo , Amazon or eBay , each of them has its own policy to attract independent developers. Thousands of small firms are building their business “on the shoulders of giants”, developing additional services for an audience of large web portals, writes CNet .

According to experts, the Internet is repeating exactly the situation already familiar from the market for traditional software. For example, in the enterprise software market, an independent developer can choose between offers from Microsoft , BEA , IBM or Oracle. Each of these corporations produces special tools for programmers, conducts training courses and offers special programs. Whoever lures an army of independent programmers to their side will gain a competitive advantage in the market. The exact same situation is starting to take shape on the Internet.

For example, the Amazon program has already registered about 180 thousand developers. This is not surprising, because Amazon is perhaps the most actively promoting its platform for creating third-party services. The proprietary technology platform is called Amazon Web Services and includes a number of different services for Internet companies, including a search engine, hosting, access to an online store and even “bionic software” Mechanical Turkwhere users from third world countries do computer work (such as pattern recognition) for a few cents per hour. Recently , another one has appeared in the list of services : Elastic Compute Cloud . It runs on the Amazon Simple Storage Service distributed hosting platform and enables the creation of large-scale distributed web services. The provision of such services puts Amazon on a par with companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun.

Thanks to Amazon, now Internet startups do not need to buy hosting, their own server, software or hire staff. It is enough to rent a site from Amazon and pay a very modest amount for access to a powerful infrastructure, which cost Amazon $ 1.5 billion in investment. Companies that have used the services of this platform, for example, SmugMug.com startup , can now not worry that their servers will not withstand the load.

Other Internet giants, including Google, Yahoo and eBay, are trying to keep up and are also trying to please independent developers in everything, providing a lot of free services for them: access to documentation, code samples, free tools for work and much more. Microsoft recently joined them, which intends to promote its Live platform , but has not yet decided exactly how to position it.

The ideology of eBay is to share profits with partners who sell products from eBay auctions through their websites. "The beauty is that we have become the operating system for e-commerce", - says Greg Ayzeks (Greg Isaacs), a program manager for developers the eBay Developers Program .

For web companies of the new generation (Web 2.0), opening software interfaces to their services becomes commonplace. At the same time, these services themselves can also be entirely on a foreign platform. The recent deal, in which Salesforce.com bought an online startup based on its own AppExchange platform and offered an additional service for using Salesforce.com services simultaneously with the Google AdWords program, was very indicative in this sense .