And it’s not at all hard to see the value of providing APIs and opening them up on the Web. I often cite that Amazon’s most profitable products are its open Web services APIs which earned them over $200m in revenue last year alone. Though Amazon’s spending on its very innovative Web services products such as S3 and Mechanical Turk has declined, it’s also due to the fact that they’ve staked out a huge amount of territory and are years ahead of many of their competitors. So right now, the money in mashups is currently providing APIs, not necessarily in building the mashups themselves yet, at least out on the Web. But in the enterprise it may be a very different story as these new lightweight models for building applications primarily via rapid integration offers the potential to fundamentally revolutionize the economics of corporate software development.

nice ‘state of mashups’ article