Day: October 7, 2005

News.com writes that Ajax is giving software a new look.

At the moment, Web pages are limited, compared with most desktop applications. AJAX frees Web pages from the clunkiness they suffer from by making them more interactive and so more functional, Web developers say.

Using AJAX, developers can create an interactive user interface that’s comparable to what’s available on desktop applications. For example, Microsoft Outlook users take for granted that they can drag an e-mail message into a folder, but that’s not possible right now with Web-based e-mail clients like MSN Hotmail. With Ajax applications, users can move items such as windows and buttons around a Web page–much as they do with programs linked to Windows or Mac OS.

Phil Wainewright dissects the Office-on-Web meme and writes:

Where the Web comes into its own is in collaborative applications, such as jointly authoring a report or an article or designing a presentation in co-operation with a virtual team of domain experts. Before we had the Internet, of course, people used to congregate in offices for the precise purpose of performing this kind of collaboration. That’s why I say Microsoft’s suite would be more accurately named Cubicle. It was originally developed with no collaborative capabilities whatsoever, and whatever capabilities have subsequently been grafted on are pretty lamentable on the whole, up to and including SharePoint. The product thus bears little or no relation to the true concept of offices as people experience and use them in the real world.

That’s why I say that anyone who emulates Microsoft Office in an attempt to build the killer collaborative application suite of Web 2.0 is on a hiding to nothing. Workers who do a lot of work in isolation will most likely continue to use Windows and Office. The rest of us will use a completely new generation of applications that automate collaboration and integration rather than isolated individual endeavors. Whatever Microsoft has historically found success with on the cubicle-bound desktop is irrelevant to what is going to succeed in the collaborative, virtual workspaces of the Web 2.0 era.

Jonathan Schwartz writes:

The trend is away from the upgrade cycle that benefits this traditional notion of distribution. For example, when’s the last time you upgraded your set top box? The answer’s probably never, and suggests that at a certain level, convenience has more value to consumers than the hassle of upgrading. Or ask a teenager which they’d rather have, a new iPod Nano, or a new PC, I’ll bet you money it’s the former (underlying the global trend that suggests more of the world will experience the internet through handsets than PC’s).

Or finally, as I did last week at a keynote, ask the audience which they’d rather give up – their browser, or all the rest of their desktop apps. (Unanimously, they’d all give up the latter without a blink.) All these trends show a slowing upgrade appetite calling into question the power of traditional distribution. In stark contrast to the value of volume, community and participation.

Now, I have been nothing if not tediously repetitive in stating my belief that volume begets value – best demonstrated by the rise of the free software movement (whose volume is derived from its price, its value from innovation, in all forms). The cost of reaching customers, traditionally the most expensive part of building a business, has largely been eliminated – resulting in massive, global participation. Value’s literally everywhere the network travels, on every device it touches (and it’s subsidizing some very interesting ideas.)

But value is returning to the desktop applications, and not simply through Windows Vista. But in the form of applications that are network service platforms. From the obvious, to music sharing clients and development tools, there’s a resurgence of interest in resident software that executes on your desktop, yet connects to network services. Without a browser. Like Skype. Or QNext. Or Google Earth. And Java? OpenOffice and StarOffice?

David Kirkpatrick writes in Fortune:

In the first phase of the Internet era, the worry was that brick-and-mortar retailers were in peril. Because most have survived, even as the Internet has burgeoned, the idea that large swaths of the economy are endangered is out of fashion. But this time its not just retailers who face daunting challenges, but service companies too, and in some of the biggestand most lucrativeindustries. We are seeing the first signs of the emergence of a small group of e-commerce service companies of a new typeessentially they’re integrated online commerce conglomerates. They aim not only to replace shopping malls, but also TV networks, telecommunications, and the banking system, among other services. And they want to do so globally.
…
these companies are converging in even more ways. Yahoo and Google, for example, are moving quickly to add video news and entertainment to their offerings. Each is coming at this set of combined opportunities from its own strengthAmazon and eBay from shopping and commerce, Google from search and advertising, MSN from communications and news, AOL from instant messaging and entertainment content, and Yahoo from personalization, communications, and shopping. Probably theyll never all offer exactly the same variety of services. Perhaps severalAmazon and AOL, for examplemight combine in order to better compete with Google, which, of the group, seems to have the most momentum.