It's interesting - and occasionally terrifying - to see what's happening in the Web2.0-Social Media-Cloud Computing world. There are many startups trying to be the next Google, the next Flickr, the next Reddit - but they are actually trying to become the next Yahoo, and of course they often don't make it. The reason might be that it's not really possible what will be the next big thing, but it's pretty easy to see what is the previous big thing.

Agile development - and now I mean agility in general, not just a specific agile software development method - received lots of attention lately and while many are promoting and practicing it some can simply not accept that we can't plan as well as we could do before. Whenever I talk to the opponents of agile software development I always start with admitting that agility is not an ideal software development method.

Recently I've been thinking why Web2.0 startups are teaching Internet users not to pay for anything. Isn't it devastating for the industry? I know, the industry is doing very well, but in the long run we create an environment where everybody will have to make a living form advertisements. Wouldn't it be more honest to say that Twitter works hard for you and they deserve a penny per month for their efforts? Reading the valuation story of 37singnals (www.37signals.com) made me realize that it is indeed a brilliant strategy to make things for free and let the market speculate.

If you like to go to libraries you must have seen or used many "library terminals" with character based displays, black-and-white or black-and-green displays. They are pretty functional and enterprise users were exposed to them for a long time, but the graphical display has made them obsolete no matter how efficient and functional they were. We like colors and beautiful pictures and X terminals were simply too slow to provide a usable client-server environment.

Customers have never had it better on the internet. Developers are more and more obsessed with customer satisfaction and in the same time they have the means to learn what users want and they can satisfy these wants nearly immediately. It is all about agile development: moving fast, correcting mistakes and understanding users better with unprecedented speed. The only problem is that while users never had it better developers never had it more difficult to produce loyal users. Users are spoilt kids, just like I am right now.

Jason Hiner's blog post is one of numerous opinions on how software is developed in the "new" world of the Internet - new meaning all the buzzwords including cloud computing, SOA, SaaS and Web2.0 - and whether this "new process" for software development and deployment is ready for the enterprise. It is correct that Google is not likely to make the next iPhone - despite the clear potential of the Android platform - but when it comes to the enterprise it is good to have a quick reality check.

The recent debate on whether Cloud Computing is a revolution or just an annoying ideology reveals how obsessed we can become with our own challenges. The owner of a large data center might find that the "cloud" is an expensive alternative with less control and a small enterprise might want to carefully think about its hosting and managed platform options. But the real hero of the Cloud Computing Era will be the talented teenager who will develop the next YouTube or Twitter in a few hours on a cloudy Sunday afternoon.

I like to observe the ongoing - and upcoming - convergence of technologies and how the most remote ideas, applications and gadgets can find each other in this weirdly exciting world of "mashups".