Greg Gianforte from RightNow Technologies published a piece in BusinessWeek Online today about the validity of the software "platform" concept. In his mind, a platform (like Oracle’s upcoming Fusion) is something customers don’t need or want and that doesn’t solve any real customer problems. In his parlance, it’s "marketecture," a marketing creation that does no service to anyone but its creator.

He even goes so far as to hurl this terminology at Salesforce.com, which is really interesting to me. Usually we on-demand guys are all teamed up fighting off the traditional software vendors of the world, but the assertion – that Salesforce’s new AppExchange is ultimately just another attempt to control the playing field without the accountability for the 3rd party stuff that will run through it – is reasonable.

His answer to the platformation of the world? On-demand and open source. From the article:

First is the on-demand delivery model. On-demand eliminates the need to create a proprietary technology platform as a competitive differentiator. By taking the operating system, database, application server, Web server, and all the other programs known as the "IT stack" off the customer’s hands, the on-demand model renders identity of the individual components meaningless.

After all, the IT stack exists only to support applications. The applications themselves must be capable of being integrated, customized, and scaled as required — but the underlying "platform" shouldn’t be the customer’s headache.

The second part of the answer is open source. Open source commoditizes the stack. MySQL replaces Oracle. Linux replaces Windows. TomCat and JBOSS replace Websphere and NetWeaver. Vendors that are still trying to differentiate themselves in these commodity businesses are headed in the wrong direction. Yet that’s exactly what platform vendors continue to do.

Here’s another link to the full article