Day 35

I stayed busy most of the day updating several of the websites I manage. I'm quite efficient at making these weekly updates and modifications, but sometimes I wonder how long I can continue hand-coding HTML when everyone is moving to the cloud. Maybe the web development industry is headed in the same direction as the auto industry was 100 years ago. In the early days of the automobile there used to be dozens of successful manufacturers here in the United States, all essentially making custom cars. Now the only automaker left that isn't a ward of the state is Ford.

When Force.com introduced the concept of Cloud Computing, things in my world changed just as fundamentally as the day Henry Ford introduced the assembly line. Already I'm starting to see fellow photographers, graphic designers and architects abandon their very beautiful handmade websites in favor of a sophisticated and easy to use liveBooks template. The writing is on the wall. I don't know who's going to be left standing ten years from now, but it probably won't be me.

Maybe if the market continues to go up like it did today, I won't always have to worry so much about the viability of my business model. I'm not holding my breath though. The chances of the stock market becoming a reliable and predictable source of income are about as good as the chances that Congress will finally get the message and start acting responsibly if Scott Brown wins in Massachusetts tonight.

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