If you
subscribe to and read my blog with any regularity, you'll probably pick up on the fact that amidst my normal rants and raves, I go through brief and intermittent periods of being fixated with certain dominant themes - writing about specific technologies like
Ajax and RSS, concepts like SOA and
Web 2.0, or platforms like
podcasting and
wireless. Such are things I take momentary intense interest in understanding and typically pine over for a couple weeks until I get it all out of my system, asking a bunch of questions, proposing different theories and drawing certain conclusions about one thing for that moment in time.
My latest such obsession has been with
all things Google.
As such, I'm now wondering what the world would be like if Google got into building, marketing and releasing developer tools. They've already made great strides with the public APIs for its
search and
mapping services, taking a very
Web 2.0 approach to connecting with their targeted audiences. So one can expect them to have at least considered becoming very active and eventually dominant in the external programing space and fostering relationships with ISVs.
So how about it? What if the Mountain View company started producing its own new programming languages, IDE(s), utilities and more to make building custom Internet-aware applications using their technologies? Now we're talking
head-to-head competition with Microsoft on an entirely different level. I think it's a very natural and expected progression as a software giant, and I'm quite sure more than a few of the smart people there have tossed this around at some point. Shoot, I know much smaller dev shops that hav written their own custom scripting languages and proprietary platforms. Why not?
What do I know? They're probably doing so already.