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I really enjoyed Marc Andreessen’s post last year titled The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet. Back then I sort of knew where Microsoft was going with what was then called Red Dog, Zurich and Horizon and is now the Azure Services Platform. Back then, in Sept 2007 we had nothing to show and whilst it’s taken over a year before I could come back to Marc’s post I think we can now legitimately say we have a level 3 platform to use his terminology.
- A Level 1 platform's apps run elsewhere, and call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services -- this is how Flickr does it.
- A Level 2 platform's apps run elsewhere, but inject functionality into the platform via a plug-in API -- this is how Facebook does it. Most likely, a Level 2 platform's apps also call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services.
- A Level 3 platform's apps run inside the platform itself -- the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app's code runs.
In addition, it is highly likely that a Level 3 platform will also superset Level 2 and Level 1 -- i.e., a Level 3 platform will typically also have some kind of plug-in API and some kind of access API.
Put in plain English? A Level 3 platform's developers upload their code into the platform itself, which is where that code runs. As a developer on a Level 3 platform, you don't need your own servers, your own storage, your own database, your own bandwidth, nothing... in fact, often, all you will really need is a browser. The platform itself handles everything required to run your application on your behalf.
Sounds a lot like Azure to me so if you haven’t ready Marc’s post I’d strongly recommend a read as he lays out the different approaches very nicely and explains why Level 3 is hard and why few will do it. In fact I would argue we’re doing all 3 levels of platforms here which is perhaps why it’s hard to immediately grasp what the Azure Services Platform is all about. For level 1 we have things like Virtual Earth, for level 2 we have things like Silverlight though I’m not sure that’s a total fit with what Marc’s saying but Windows Azure is clearly level 3.
I’m interested to see the intersection of posts like Marc’s with other commentators like Tom Bittman from Gartner who is looking more broadly at the cloud phenomenon but I’m sure will have some insight to add to Marc’s post.
Of course my interest is in how this plays out for Azure and Microsoft but think we can learn from some of these smart commentators on how to refine the way we talk about this stuff. It’s way to easy to fall in to geekspeak without thinking about the customer/developer benefit.