This is the exciting bit-- there are five major players who are going to be competing in this space because it's very juicy. Google, MS, AWS, Sun, and Yahoo. I

This is the exciting bit-- there are five major players who are going to be competing in this space because it's very juicy. Google, MS, AWS, Sun, and Yahoo. I feel like we've hit some sort of 'event horizon' now in "Web 2.0", or are quickly approaching it. It feels a bit like the end of Web 2.0 or the beginning of something else... MS in this space will surely be a bit more ambitious regarding languages, as they have an entire .NET library that can go to IL and run as securely as it needs to run on their infrastructure. The database aspects would be more familiar to developers, but probably somewhat less scalable. Sun for their part were already talking a bit about MySQL services via SAAS, and Java also would be suited pretty well for secure running on infrastructure servers. They've always talked a lot about cloud computing and making the network open and employed. I'm really liking (and am somewhat scared) to see where things are going all of a sudden. Unfortunately, the web startup space is about to get incredibly crowded and revenue models are going to get harder and harder as free web services become more common than they already are.