Bill Scott is doing a good job of nudging Sabre towards the front of line of cool services and education for developers. Great blog – I pointed to Bill’s AJAX page on RICO last week (I like the view source approach on some of the demos) but it seems there is more good stuff going on. The Yahoo search engine "fix" for page after page click throughs is now live.
The design pattern thing could attract the attention of Kathy Sierra, who has a wide readership and might send some traffic some passionate users Bill’s way. Design Patterns and mind-maps. Or maybe not. This blog might even send some folks that way.
Sabre is known for its back end transactions. It is the home of monster scale message passing using TPF.
With the new TPF GNU Toolkit from IBM for the "legacy guys" and also this user centric design front end thinking, maybe it will become a bit easier for the business to start attracting developers to write to its services. Web 2.0 front end richness and interactivity, mixed with hardcore messaging at the back end is an interesting value proposition. Compare and contrast the traditional Sabre developer web site approach with Bill’s blog-oriented work.A friendly face at Sabre, to join the likes of Gary Potter, who looks at airline industry business issues and geek stuff.
If developers do begin to to think of Sabre as a platform that "gets it", and drive some traffic accordingly, it would be another good example of an architect driving the bottom line. This time with AJAX. So much for IT not providing competitive advantage.
eBay, google, yahoo and others are winning because they are platforms, and architectures of participation. I can’t think of any of the old line business mass messaging service businesses that are as well positioned as those just mentioned. It looks like Sabre is beginning some plays in that regard. But the corporation will have to support these guys if it wants to really push on. Competition is fierce and the next gen services are powering ahead with loosely coupled personalization. You have to minimise the "left-dangling moments" though, which is why it was good to see this from Gary. Of course looking after customers is a requirement for everyone, eBay included.
Doing business is getting more interesting by the day.
Was anyone from Sabre at Where 2.0, I wonder, in San Francisco this week? Sorry I missed it Tim, I was JavaOne’d [it was good, lots of great people]…. thanks for the invite. Sabre could look to splice the dueling map APIs with some of its services. Where do you want to go today, and from where? Three cools in one paragraph – it sounds like Where 2.0 was cool.
What is better at the moment than being Open? Businessweek Online (blogger) says its the in thing (kinda, sorta).
Have a great weekend everyone.
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