Read a great post by Peter Rip on mashups and whether they represent features or “standalone economic activity.” (I’ll be using “standalone economic activity” in a sentence as soon as possible by the way.)
The discussion really surrounds the question of value when you build on top of one or more APIs without having significant standalone functionality of your own. How dependent is your application on an API from a different company? If you remove one or more APIs are you left with anything of value?
Peter’s post actually reminds me of one of my own posts recently regarding a cliche amongst enterprise folks that suggests that companies divert customer attention to professsional services engagements and APIs when trying to cover up for product shortcomings.
Peter’s examples of enterprise application mashups are certainly interesting, but the problem with enterprise mashups relate to development and testing. Someone will come along and develop a framework that is aware of a ton of APIs that will allow “Great Plains and Salesforce and Fedex into a customer RMA/package tracking solution.”
But the problem is that Great Plains will make changes in their code that changes the behavior of the application and potentially the API. This means that someone would need to constantly test the framework and the interfaces with the mashup to make sure that nothing is broken.
This creates for a huge spaghetti strapped environment that has too much potential for failure. Centralizing the management, development, and testing of enterprise mashups is the only way to get this done. One throat to choke.
One solution is the push the responsibility of developing and testing the interfaces to the vendor themselves. This could work, but software companies won’t join a party unless they sense that they are being left out. So you have to get everyone in at once.
That’s a political fight if there is one. Does Microsoft really want to level the playing field with a smaller vendor simply to make life easier for a customer? Not really. No big company wants to relinquish their competitive advantages just to make things pretty.
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