Why People Don’t Care About Pipes, Popfly and Google Mashup Editor
It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google are all trying to encourage people to create mashups of RSS (and other) types of information coming from popular web services. To this end, each of the above companies has created their own tools: Yahoo! created Pipes; Microsoft created Popfly; and now Google has created the Google Mashup Editor. But who are these “people” they’re aiming at? Do many people really care about these tools? I think the answer might be - no. Here’s why…
The first thing to say is that I’m willing to bet most software developers don’t care too much about these new tools. If you know how to write software, there are better tools available than Pipes and Popfly. But wait, I hear you say, these new tools aren’t aimed at developers! They’re aimed at non-developers…
Of course, it’s always been a kind of Holy Grail in software development to create tools so easy to use that anyone can create great software. Every five to ten years, companies that make software tools get excited about new visual programming environments that promise to make creating software trivial for anyone. It’s easy to understand why - they want to broaden the market for their offerings. However, if you look at the big picture, these tools have pretty much failed to deliver. I think there are a couple of reasons why.
Firstly writing software is a fundamentally hard problem. Just thinking of algorithms conceptually is something that most people find incredibly difficult. And even “non-developers” who believe they understand algorithms and software tend not to think sufficiently clearly to really be able to design a program that works in the real world. Now, “mashups” are actually a bit different to what’s come before. That’s because you don’t really have to think of algorithms to make a mashup that works. In principle, it really is pretty much a matter of “wiring” servces together.
However, there’s a second problem. It’s much bigger, and might, I suspect, be a real killer… including for tools like Pipes and Popfly. It’s this - most people simply don’t want to create software. They just aren’t interested. Not now. Not ever. And there are probably even fewer people that want to create mashups. So, at the risk of stating the obvious - software development tools aimed at people that aren’t interested in developing software aren’t very likely to find widespread use.
I suspect the tools that will succeed best in the “mashup” market are those that are aimed at web developers. So, if you’re looking to see who will “win” the popularity battle out of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google, you might do worse than to consider those tools from the perspective of the web developer. If you do that, though, you’re into the world of RIA… and then you need to take Adobe, with its great tools, into account; and also possibly Sun with its forthcoming Consumer JRE and JavaFX toolset.
I’ve seen Microsoft is followed by young crowds and I think this is setting a trend for the future of application development. Maybe future developers are going to be broader (meaning not as high as far as logical thinking requirements) as we have more and more machines to control and program.
Know your customer: Pipes, Popfly, and mass acceptance « Shebanation on 04 Jun 2007 at 7:23 pm
[...] your customer: Pipes, Popfly, and mass acceptance Simon Brocklehurst has written a nice piece on why mashup services like Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft Popfly will never get mass accepta…. I agree that these things are never going to be super-popular services. The questions I always ask [...]