Yesterday I saw a wonderful post by Francois Gossieaux telling us, the readers, about his own observations of the Web 2.0 evolution. It required some time to structure my own thoughts on this and here I would like to comment just a few of his points and broaden the discussion onto the whole world of software development carried on nowadays.

Many of the new web 2.0 companies are built by a few passionate individuals - and with budgets that fit on credit cards. And forget about traditional marketing expenses - it’s all word-of-mouth, sometimes enhanced with a few dollars worth of search engine marketing - but gone are the days of expensive direct marketing campaigns and traditional promotions. It’s all about influencing the influencers - but more on that later…

Ten years ago it was a whole big story to convert a though into real project, no matter whether it’s entirely virtual, like software, or has some materialistic properties, like hardware device. And what’s most important, you would need a lot of people to turn up trumps. Today the development of Internet and software engineering technologies brought us wonderful opportunities. We can work in small teams and with low budgets, making really exciting things. The technology, existing methodologies, a great experience and a speed of knowledge sharing accelerated the development, testing, marketing and selling of our creations tenfold.

The fun part is that this trend will only accelerate. Think about when the re-mixing/mashup age goes mainstream - then everybody will be able to become an app publisher - just like everybody already can be a content publisher.

Exactly. We are all the pushers of the future and we accelerate it daily. The rhythm of today’s life is constantly increasing. We are in long run for keeping up with the Joneses. It costs nothing to publish content today. It costs almost nothing to develop something (while it still requires the imagination to find the niche and make something remarkable there). It is going to cost nothing to build own networks and markets tomorrow. When I visit some product site it’s no longer possible for me to tell the difference between the “professional” site of a big company and the site of someone working alone. Isn’t it frightening? Yes. But it equally amazing as we are no longer bound to the brainy work-groups possessing multi-million technologies to carry out some complex research. Almost everyone can start his own “space exploration odyssey” using tools available at hand.

I can see the trend towards the simplification and further acceleration of software products development and what is related to it. I already stared to prepare myself for the times when I will be required to convert the requirements of the customers into the real working project in real time during the conversation in order to make them happy. It’s going to become the essential part of software development business as the velocity will mean everything. If you can’t make it in no time, you are no longer the competitor on the software market. The Acceleration!

Be warned! Get prepared!