A couple of months ago, Jon Potter came over for lunch and asked me to be the chairman of the board at the Application Developers Alliance.
I said, Sure! On one condition: I get to define what you mean by Application, what you mean by Developers, and of course, Alliance has the standard definition from Star Wars: A New Hope. He agreed to that.
So, heres my attempt to define those things.
Historically, the computer industry has divided software into two types.
Systems Software is inward facing: it controls the computers themselves. That includes things like operating systems, internet servers, and so on. It makes computers useful, but it doesn't really do anything for people. Yet.
Applications Software is built on top of systems software, and it interfaces with human beings so it can do useful stuff.
When a developer writes applications software, they are writing a script for the future.
They're creating little pre-programmed robots which they will send into the future. Those robots are not very smart and follow the script they were given exactly. Thats why writing those scripts is so important.
Every decision an application developer makes, small or large, determines how the future will play out.
It's hard to believe that something as trivial as taking out the trash is impacted by software, but it is, thanks to a flashlight app I installed on my smartphone. So many aspects of modern life are affected by software. You couldnt eat a pineapple if there wasnt software controlling delivery logistics, in the jet airplane that delivered it, and in the supermarket cash registers. Pay for that pineapple with a credit card and you've probably caused millions of lines of code to execute somewhere.
Software is everywhere.
We may be eating the pineapples, but, as Marc Andreessen wrote in the Wall Street Journal (8/20/11), "Software is eating the world." More and more of the world is running on software and being disrupted by software. No aspect of modern life has been unchanged and uninfluenced by software. This is closely related to Razorfish's 1995 slogan "Everything that can be digital will be," because all that digital stuff is controlled by software.
People spend millions of hours interacting with apps, from the biggies like Google and Facebook to this tiny app I downloaded for my iPhone that lets me order shoes. I haven't been to a shoe store in years.
And every minute of those interactions is controlled by software. That's why software is eating the world, and that's why app developers are the designers of the future, and that's why app development is ridiculously important to the human race, so if you follow THOSE definitions, I'm proud to join the App Developers Rebel Alliance and make sure that the future plays out for the benefit of the human race.
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