52 Bicycles

Peter Rip discusses whether search is really an application or a service. And by service, he means something that powers an application (hence his “Search Inside” headline) with which the end-user directly interacts.

I’m probably just playing catchup here, but I found this idea of a “service” as a partial platform to be really interesting. So an application would pull together data and attributes from several services to drive an end-user experience.

In retrospect, I guess this is what is meant by “mashup.” But still I think that entities that want to offer services like this should act like platforms, both technologically (per Tom Evslin’s excellent commentary) and strategically, per my earlier observations.

I am also a little concerned by the weaker strategic position of a one-off service - when a more singular, multi-service platform may be able to offer better integration for the applications at lower cost both to itself and the application.

But all this seems hearty food for thought.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 19th, 2005 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Reddit This