What Is a Technology System?
Technology systems have five primary layers: (1) hardware, (2) operating system, (3) application, (4) application add-in, and (5) cloud. Hardware is the equipment you can touch and hold: your laptop, your phone, or a server sitting in a data center somewhere. Operating systems are installed on top of hardware and provide a foundation to run applications. Operating systems you might use every day are Microsoft Windows on your laptop, Apple iOS on your iPhone, or the Linux operating system (popular on servers). Applications do something useful (or interesting) for the user: Microsoft Outlook on your laptop, Angry Birds (a game) on your iPhone, and Facebook on the web are all applications. On top of applications are application add-ins, which run on top of other applications. For example, I have a Norton Antivirus add-in running on top of Microsoft Outlook to protect against e-mail spam. Facebook created an entire industry around its application add-ins: The game “Farmville,” for instance, allows groups of users to tend a farm together. The following table summarizes the first four layers for these examples.
If you are in the high-technology industry, you've likely heard a lot about cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In terms of the layers ...
Get Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
