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Sharing Lego blocks: Modular software reshapes the computing landscape
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04/05/2006, By John Markoff
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The Internet is entering its Lego era. Blocks of interchangeable software components are proliferating on the Web, and developers are joining them together to create a potentially infinite array of useful new programs. This new software represents a marked departure from the inflexible, at times unwieldy, programs of the past, which were designed to run on individual computers.
For example, Google last month bought Writely, a Web-based word-processing program created by three Silicon Valley programmers. The Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said that Google did not buy the program to compete against Microsoft Word. Rather, he said, it viewed Writely as a key component in hundreds of products it is now developing.
Microsoft is not the only company threatened by the simple tools of the Web 2.0 movement. Adobe Systems, which recently acquired Macromedia, publisher of the widely used Flash graphics standard, is under pressure from Ajax, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a new development technique for creating interactive Web applications that look and function like desktop programs.
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