Business model analysis for emerging RIA platforms

Abstract

In the world of computers the word platform has been used to describe the fundamental components on which solutions are implemented. These solutions are usually applications which perform something useful for the end user. In its earliest avatar the computing platform simply consisted of the hardware on which tasks were performed by manipulating bits and bytes directly. This evolved eventually in the days of mini-computers to mean a collection of hardware, the operating system (OS)which performed the task of managing the hardware, and system software which allowed the end user build applications to run on the OS and hardware. With increasingly complex applications being built which were not only large in size but also required multiple users to use them across distributed geographies, the computer platform evolved to include certain software components which removed the onus of providing some standard services (like access control, prevention of one user corrupting another s data, etc) from application developers. These software platforms worked on top of the existing hardware platforms. A very popular example of such a platform is Sun Microsystem s J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) platform. This situation led to a proliferation of business software being built where application developers concentrated on solving the business problems and deploying these solutions as applications on the software platforms like J2EE.Even before the evolution of software platforms the client-server usage model evolved. In this paradigm, a large part of the computing was performed on powerful machines deployed at a central location called a server while the end users had a smaller machine, known as the client which was used to display the results generated at the server. The advantage was users did not have to buy large powerful machines to do their jobs and the servers provided great economies of scale. But the biggest drawback in this model was that every user request had to travel all the way from the client to the server and the result had to travel back.