Three cornerstones of a new business world: APIs, identities, and data

The resignation of Steve Sinofsky, the father of Windows 8, which sparked unrest in the industry this week, has also identified three cornerstones of a new business world: APIs, identities, and data.

Ballmer said that Microsoft needed someone to cross the product and integrate the various services to provide a unified customer experience. That means he seems to realize that rejecting Ray Ozzie's Windows Live Mesh project is not a good idea.

In short, mesh is a data center that serves as a platform for Microsoft's applications and services. With Windows Live Mesh and device Web sites, copies of documents, photos, and other files on users ' computers (whether they are PCs or Macs), mobile phones, and so on are kept up to date.

Ozzie's vision threatens a similar effort on the SkyDrive Web Storage service by Windows President Steven Sinofsky's team. Sinofsky said that relying on service development outside of the Windows sector would delay the next version of the operating system, damaging the company's flagship products. Under the Sinofsky of the opposition, Ballmer otherwise mesh project, eventually led to the departure of Ozzie.

And now Ballmer's decision seems to prove that the former Microsoft chief architect, Ozzie, has a brighter future ahead of the plan.

The unification of data is only one aspect. Today, integration is a problem that everyone has to face. The future system is necessarily a complex system that needs to connect people, organizations and everything in life.

Kynetx is one of the startups dedicated to such a system (Facebook, Sina Weibo, Tencent micro-mail, etc.). The concept of event-driven interaction is designed to automate our daily lives, using a variety of interconnected systems to provide intelligence for people's actions. For example, a calendar update might trigger an intelligent agent to make a travel plan. It may be implemented using an identity service layer, based on the analysis of the user's data to understand its properties and behavior, and then through a series of API calls to complete.

Kynetx's founder, Phil Windley, says the combination of identity, programmability, data and context is a new reality. In addition, the Internet of things is indispensable. The combination of these elements will bring us a whole new experience. Once the identity of every aspect of life is wrapped into personal cloud and data stores, a new century will come.

Then the enterprise needs of the API is self-evident. These APIs are changing the face of the data. There is no point in closing the data. The architecture of it is changing, and API management companies provide different ways to keep data open.

But the most important factor is how we identify ourselves. To make the most of the cloud, by connecting services and event drivers to our personal work life, our identity becomes more important-who are you? What kind of person are you? These two seemingly simple questions are sometimes impossible to answer.

The declining concept of "application" and "system" should be a trend. Applications will be obscured by APIs and data, and the system will gradually become a symbol of closure. The prosperity of all the platforms will depend on its openness, as is now the nation-state debate.