The search engine company sent an executive to keynote the wrapup of the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo; Adam Bosworth noted the move to web services in his talk.
Bosworth touched on a number of topics during his keynote last week, taking time to praise web services and dig at his former employer, Microsoft. PC Advisor noted his observations, including that of a shift by developers from proprietary APIs to open services online.
“Mostly, what we see today is people building apps using things like PHP and the Lamp [Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python] stack,” Bosworth said at the keynote. “In this world, the API is the URL,” he said, no doubt making a reference to Google’s products like Maps.
Although Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Sun exec Scott McNealy didn’t announce a web-based version of OpenOffice, Bosworth sees a niche for it. “I’m astonished that people are paying to basically create content,” he said in taking a shot at Microsoft Office.
Not everyone shares that rosy view of productivity suites being hosted remotely. Russell Beattie posted in his excellent list of Web 2.0 rants about how new technology isn’t going to change how people work:
AJAXy, Tagged and Shared: Calendaring, To Do Lists, Email, Notes, Word Processors, Project Management, Databases, and anything to do with Getting Things Done. Have fun with all that, but 99.9% of the people out there will still be using Microsoft Office and Yahoo! (Yes, my employer, but I’d say that anyways.) Really. Look, I don’t *trust* your site to keep my personal (and definitely not my professional) data safe, okay, and I’m not going to change my daily habits to include a site that may disappear from the face of the Earth tomorrow.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
