Matt Voerman has started a blog series on what motivates people and businesses to build rich Internet applications. The two initial articles, focusing on Web 2.0 and SOA, and user experiences, are great reads for anyone who is interested in building out an RIA.

One thing that Matt nails in his discussion on user experiences is the fact that UI and experience design are becoming much more critical to applications than ever before. However I think he fails to mention one of the primary reasons for this: more and more services are becoming commodities that anyone can use and build into their applications. Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and others have created a set of services that are freely available to anyone - just sign up and go. Their work, along with that of a number of open source projects (like Drupal for instance) means that the backend for an application can't be the differentiator - anyone can take the services that those applications offer and build out an application.

Combine that with the fact that competition online is incredibly intense. Small start up costs allow pretty much anyone to start a company that can build out an app using those services. What's the difference between the company that I start and the company that you start, if we're both hosted on Amazon EC 2 (for performance), storing our data on Amazon S3 (unlimited storage paid as we use it), and integrating with user information from Facebook (so users don't have to register for our site). Why will someone use my application and not yours? The main difference, as those services become available to everyone, is the user experience. Which application do I prefer using? Which application allows users to get the job done faster?

Don't get me wrong, a great user experience won't solve all your problems. Network effects are also important - being first to market can provide a company with more users than another, and the network effects from these users can make a company difficult to overtake. (Its not impossible however - look at how Facebook is taking over MySpace and LinkedIn as the primary social networking tool though one could argue that Facebook also provides a better user experience than MySpace as well.) However, as more services come online that allow anyone to create high performing, scalable applications, its becoming increasingly clear that the user experience will be the primary differentiator.