Every once in a while, Scoble comes up with a classic post, and this is another one.  Extracts here, and this is a superb summary of the top players strengths.  This provides a useful backdrop to online banking planning 5 – 10 years out.  For example something I think about, is what banking online will look like in 2020.

Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger » The coming G/Y/M/A/e developer wars

So, let’s go through the players one-by-one.

Google. Google has some daunting advantages in the coming developer wars. First, nearly EVERY developer I know uses Google. Most use Gmail. Most use Firefox (which really is a Google-friendly browser). A large percentage use Google Maps. The fact that Microsoft has ceded the influential geeks over to Google is going to pay off big time for Google. ….

Yahoo. Yahoo has the social software world, which will be its key card that it can use to stay in the game. Whenever I meet a developer I ask him or her about the services they use. Invariably the names Flickr and Del.icio.us come up. ……  So, Yahoo isn’t seen as “geeky” as Google, which might hurt their position. …..

Microsoft. Microsoft has a huge number of developers but those developers are skilled at building Visual Basic apps for businesses. They don’t think a lot about the Web. …..

Amazon. Amazon is out in the lead right now with S3. …..

eBay. …..  Seriously what they have is the largest buying and selling community out there. And they have Skype, which hasn’t made sense yet. But, Skype built a great P2P system. …..

My money? It’s on Google. Why? Cause I go back to the developers. Right now they are more likely to use Google’s stuff than any other — you should see how developers and geeks talk about all these companies

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