Platform Wars: Universities as Labs for New Applications

Hooray! Yet another Universities becomes a testing bed for tech industry applications (even though they had the class last semester as well).

Over the next few years, application growth is projected to continue its explosive growth as techies and entrepreneurs alike develop and design niche applications. Similar to the Gold Rush of 1848 and the 2000 height of the Dot Com, the twofold Application-and-Platform Wars are now full-blown with tens-to-hundreds of daily updates on new companies emerging and existing ones announcing new releases. The catch is that industry leaders have no interest in coddling naive students into building their own platforms - where's the monopoly in that? That part of today's wars must be left to the daring, the dumb, or the incumbents.

This time, it's not about unclaimed land or landing page - it's about niche platforms, and modular utilities and service channels. Aggregate horizontally, integrate nicely with other verticals, or spin your wheels until you're driving on the rims of your antique 2-wheeler and eventually trail off course into the dark matter of the ether.  

While this trend was initially forecasted after Facebook opened it's platform, this onslaught became clear to the world around the same time Stanford University began offering facebook application classes in late 2007. Their web portal can be found here for more information about the class. In it's first year or so, facebook's platform mainly housed stand-alone time-wasters with neglected or non-existent business models. Through the hype, people realized education was in order and Stanford was an obvious candidate for taking the plunge. 

What will come next? My bet is information and relationship management tools gain more publicity. The first sign of this at the consumer level was when Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein announced they were leaving Facebook in July 2008 to start up a productivity suite company. There's too much going on for a single person to manage effectively. Greater efficiency is desperately needed, not just in the auto industries - silly bailouts.

After that, people and objects must become more 'intelligent' to further squeeze our existence into a semantic web or some semblance of such.

What do you think?