Looking at how web applications are developing (thanks for HTML 5 and Google), it seems that web API are getting more and more common and even some newer web applications (or even desktop applications such as widgets) can be completely built on those APIs alone.

How’s this development going to impact the total performance and efficiency of the entire IT industry?

One thing that comes to my mind is dependency. If the main service were to have any downtime at all, all the services and websites using the API will experience downtime as well. Although Google seems to have shown extremely great uptime performance so far, we may never know.

By the way, just imagine this like a science fiction movie. An alien explorer has landed on a planet which was just recently destroyed by some war or disaster. All the computers in that planet uses cloud computing. So there’s no way to extract data from any computers which the explorer comes across even though there’s computers everywhere!

How’s cloud service going to overcome this problem?