Small but important pieces of functionality – that’s my defintion of a widget* (and likely yours as well). I want my widgets available on my desktop, close by, but still out of the way. The widget metaphor can be extended to any type of necessary functionality, really. That’s a key aspect of our strategy.

So what does this mean?

For starters, it means that your next killer app won’t be a primary app, as that space is pretty full with entrenched players and tools that aren’t going to be easily displaced. The next killer app will aggregate widget functionality, collecting a group of widgets, plugins or extensions to provide the user a meaningful way to control, consume and relate the widgets.

Huh?

Think of it this way: source control is a necessary function for software developers, but it isn’t a primary function for software developers. Software developers write software, and one of the attributes, or functional aspects of their process, is that of source control. Thus, source control – to a software developer – has widget characteristics. S/he wants the source control widget nearby, ready to do its work, and then get out of the way.

Commonly seen widgets include weather checkers, flight checkers, calculators, clocks, calendars… you get it. Things that have very specific utility to enhance your real work, but by themselves don’t produce any actual work product for you, i.e. you aren’t using your weather widget to develop new sales opportunities.

Think about how many other attributes of your daily work process can be decomposed to widgets and you’ll understand how we are approaching our business.

* Apple usually refers to the applets in their Dashboard as gadgets, while Konfabulator (now a Yahoo property) refers to these as widgets.

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