Think what would happen if Microsoft was giving away Windows for free to everyone, and would also be giving away Visual Studio to developers, but taking %% of every sale of every program ever made for MS Windows. Think of how much more money would they would have made? Could Bill Gates have become a first trillionaire?
First of all, no worries, I am not a nut who writes another OS. Creating a new operating system is WAY too complicated, costly and most importantly financially risky: OSes are commodity - it's impossible to change the world by creating another OS now. Instead, I am creating a new platform. What is platform? To give a definition, platform is an operating environment for programs, and a user interface conduit for users. To give a few examples: Internet is platform: back-end web server is an operating environment for programs and browser is a conduit for the UI; every operating system is a platform: Windows, Linux, MacOS – their APIs and drivers form an operating environment and OS desktop and windows is a UI conduit; web browser is a platform too, albeit a limited one – it can run client scripts and therefore it’s an operating environment and a UI conduit at the same time. You get the idea…
Platforms differ in reach and complexity. Operating systems make a somewhat mediocre platform: they have limited reach – contained by the hardware they designed for, by how incredibly expensive it is to make an OS, and by how hard it's to learn to develop applications for a new OS. Adoption threshold for a new OS is very high. Web, on the other hand, is a very good platform: HTTP protocol is insanely simple, web development is relative simple and mastered by ever-growing legions of developers, web is not constrained by hardware, and finally web has a virtually unlimited reach. Curiously, web as a platform is built on top of other platforms - underlying disparate OSes running web server back-end software and user browsers. it’s a platform layered on top of other platforms – OSes.
The drawbacks of the Web as a platform include:
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Deploying and operating web apps is complex and costly. It is very hard to make an application accessible on the web: all the routers, firewalls, networking, DNS servers, domain names leases, IP addresses - everything involved in deployment of a web application is much more complex from user’s standpoint compared to regular program with a "pop-in a CD and have it installed" type of deployment;
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Web applications are hard to market. From developers’ perspective business models for selling web app is limited to big-ticket sales to businesses who have budget and skills necessary to run web-facing infrastructure.
Now, imagine World Wide Web with above-mentioned problems removed. That is what I am doing: a new web-based platform that has user reach as wide as current Internet, but removes application deployment and marketing hurdles that are limiting web application usage right now. That’s a unique innovation right there. “But hey, there’s more!” Another unique innovation is the business model: I am not going to sell this platform to users, or development tools to developers. All will get it for free. The catch? All software that uses our platform can only be sold and bought using channels belonging and controlled by UltiDev, and like eBay we are going to take %% of every application sale.
You may have some concerns, like will developers find this new platform attractive enough to spend effort learning it and making programs for it? The answer is no, they won’t. Because they won’t need to. The beauty of it is that application developers can take their existing skills and even their already-built applications and simply package them together with our new platform components and ship it to users. Every member of millions-strong army of web developers worldwide is ready to take advantage of this new platform.
You may also wonder how complex is this new platform? Will it take billions of dollars an decades to create it? Well, it’s complex enough to take two years to develop, but the good news is that it’s virtually finished and working pre-alpha releases are deployed.
Small detail: the platform described above is called HttpVPN™ and some additional technical information is available at http://ultidev.com/Products/httpVPN/.