Today I was interviewed by Robert Hof of Business Week. BW is a fairly high profile (also known as a “tier 1 publication”) with both an online and print version of their content. The interview caught me by surprise but we muddled through discussing service oriented architecture, the evolution of the internet and web service mash-ups. Great fun and certainly as a technologist a great shot in the arm for my career.

Robert did pose one question which I’m still mulling which was “with all the web services available today (Flickr, Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google etc.) is there a business model somewhere in there? You know I honestly believe the answer is yes. Living in America it’s definitely shown me just how easy it is to start a mediocre business, Route 22 is full of them.

Offshoring is creating a bottomless IT industry here in the US. College grads can’t get work, experienced developers are getting laid off. Seems everyone’s an architect all of a sudden. It’s the only way to survive.

I see the next couple of years as one where the Specialist who can envision a design, articulate it, manage a team on and offshore and still code being the single most sought after role in IT. If you get a couple of folks together like that, you have a killer company that would never be out of work. Right now the industry is flooded with Architects who can’t code and Coders who can’t design.

Loosely coupled systems means disperate technologies. Business will implement web services but WSDL, REST and XML-RPC is only 1 piece of the puzzle. Tying it all together needs real vision and true expertise which only comes if you stay hands on.

Ok so I’m still in search of a killer computer case. Here’s about the silliest idea for a custom computer case I’ve ever seen: http://www.g-news.ch/articles/nhp200nc/ and here’s a nice looking Apple Kiosk which doesn’t look all that comfortable at all but then again I don’t think you’re supposed to sit at it.