Independent web developers build a business "on the shoulders of giants"

No matter how you take a large Internet corporation, be it Google , Yahoo , Amazon or eBay , each of them has its own policy of attracting independent developers. Thousands of small firms are building their business "on the shoulders of giants", developing additional services for the audience of large web portals, writes CNet .

According to experts, on the Internet, the situation that is already familiar from the traditional software market is exactly the same. For example, in the enterprise software market, an independent developer can choose between offers from Microsoft , BEA , IBM, or Oracle . Each of these corporations produces special tools for programmers, conducts training courses and offers special programs. Those who win over an army of independent programmers to their side will gain a competitive advantage in the market. Exactly the same situation begins to take shape on the Internet.

For example, in the Amazon program about 180 thousand developers have already been registered. This is not surprising, because Amazon is perhaps the most actively promoting its platform for creating third-party services. The proprietary technology platform is called Amazon Web Services and includes a variety of different services for Internet companies, including search engine, hosting, access to online store, and even the “bionic software” of Mechanical Turk , where users from third world countries do computer work ( for example, pattern recognition for a few cents per hour. Recently, another one appeared in the list of services : Elastic Compute Cloud . It runs on the Amazon Simple Storage Service distributed hosting platform and allows you to create large-scale distributed web services. Providing such services puts Amazon on a par with companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun.

Thanks to the services of Amazon, now an Internet startup does not need to buy hosting, its own server, software and hire staff. It is enough to rent a site from Amazon and pay a very modest amount for access to powerful infrastructure, which cost Amazon $ 1.5 billion in investments. Companies that have used the services of this platform, for example, a startup SmugMug.com , can no longer worry about the fact that their servers cannot withstand the load.
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Other Internet giants, including Google, Yahoo and eBay, are trying to keep up and also try to please independent developers in everything, providing them with a lot of free services: access to documentation, code samples, free tools for work and much more. They recently joined and the company Microsoft, which is going to promote its platform Live , but has not yet decided how to position it.

The ideology of eBay is to share profits with partners who sell goods from eBay auctions through their sites. “The beauty is that we have become an e-commerce operating system,” says Greg Isaacs, Program Manager for the eBay Developers Program .

For web companies of the new generation (Web 2.0), opening software interfaces to their services is becoming commonplace. At the same time, these services themselves can also be entirely on another platform. The recent deal in which Salesforce.com bought an Internet startup that was located on its own AppExchange platform and offered an additional service for using Salesforce.com services at the same time as Google AdWords program was very indicative in this sense.