Pile It High...

At BarCamp Leeds last Saturday, Dean Saddler CIO at PlusNet evangelised about how you can build a web-based applications quickly and easily and one of the tricks was to repackage and reuse the same underlying technology in different market niches and applications.

His take on monetisation was that if you have been smart about development, you only have to charge sensibly and adopt a subscription model to take market share from bloatware providers charging perpetual licence fees (where have I heard that before?). He also emphasised that his development plan only extended as far as the next round of features that users had requested. Sounds like the whole concept of component reuse and evolutionary development has finally caught up with web designers!

Not sure I totally agree you can produce something of any substantial worth so cheaply - even if you outsource development to China - but the idea that you have to work smart, reuse components, adopt incremental development strategies that keep you close to the users and offer something significantly better and cheaper than what has gone before is undoubtedly true.