This is a continuation in the series on “The Social Web Economy“

“Developers, Developers, Developers!” This is probably one of the best known quotes of Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. Many people may find him crazy for the way he speaks about developers in the video that I’ve included below, but he’s right. Not just in the social web economy but in the digital economy, developers are some of the most important people. They produce the products and services that consumers use on the web.

When the social web was transformed overnight by the launch of the Facebook platform last year, many developers had mini-empires practically overnight. Whether it was individual developers or small teams of developers, these individuals now had businesses with relatively sizable revenue that they had to run. At f8 a couple weeks ago you could walk around the room and see how the passing of one year had impacted many of these developers.

Some had been acquired, others continued to go it alone. Those that decided to go it alone are now being pushed to their limits and realizing the challenges of trying to grow a small business on a global scale. The key takeaway is that developers for the most part are not businesspeople. While they may have the entrepreneurial spirit that burns in many of us, they are best suited at building the programs that we all have grown to love (or sometimes hate).

What is the source of developer tension? While developers have tension resulting from numerous sources (bugs in their applications, tight deadlines, etc), in the social web economy, the primary source of developer tension is the platforms. When a platform decides to revamp their entire system, or make sudden changes resulting from user feedback or malevolent actions by another developer, the rest of developers are impacted. On the Facebook platform the result was developers waking up at 3 am to fix their no longer functioning applications. Occasionally teams of developers worked around the clock in response to complaints from Facebook about terms of service violations.

While mature platforms don’t impact the developers as significantly, there will always be tension between the two parties.

Next post in series: “The Social Web Economy: Entrepreneur Leaders”