Web Things, by Mark Baker

It’s good to see Bill Gurley has restarted his “Above The Crowd” newsletter. His latest is “Software in a box”, where he talks about a topic that I’m quite familiar with; we shipped the first version of our software at Idokorro in a Cobalt Qube for some of the reasons he mentioned; ease of installation, manageability, etc..

One important reason that he didn’t list though, is integration. Typically, integration with third party software is done via proprietary APIs. If you put your software into its own (black) box, then the only interfaces you have for integration purposes are commodity application protocols.