Today, Google hosted a developer day for 5,000 developers worldwide at San Jose convention center. The highly anticipated Google Gears – an open source browser plugin which enables the creation of offline web applications via Javascript – was unveiled…

Note : I still think (as mentioned in my blog) that the advantage that GOOG has over MSFT is essentially a catch up game. Vista 2.0 will bring something amazing and GOOG’s stock will go down spiralling down its strong hold on mindshare and marketshare.

david: “I never did either. 5 years ago I bought all my music through Amazon. Now I buy all my music through iTunes-a non browser rich client application. Whoops. Consumers rarely anticipate paradigm changes, but when someone offers a better experience (more reponsive, more engaging, easier to use, simpler, faster, richer, etc) they leap to it.”

it’s a good example, but i’m not sure how transferable it is. first, there’s the fact that the overwhelming majority of products sold on the web aren’t deliverable in a digital format. second, the example seems to imply separate stores for different item types: are we to have a separate rich client store for each item type? i for one hope not.

the browser / webpage combination, imperfect as it may be, is the simplest solution that will work and thus the most popular.

“As a publisher of applications, why have my experience and brand subservient to Internet Explorer or Firefox brands Their aims and brand are not (neccesarily) aligned with mine, why am I giving them top billing in my experience?”

interesting. i’ve never heard this particular objection before. will have to do some digging to see if it’s more common than i realize.

James: “Why do I have so many places my contacts are managed? Email client, LinkedIn, Yahoo IM, etc. Why can’t all these places I have “contacts” talk to each other, synchronize, etc? This is starting to happen in small niches, but Desktop 2.0 as a whole is a long ways off since most Desktop application vendors may be at risk of loosening their lock-in strategies if they move to more open models of integration.”

amen, sir, amen. wrote this up in my Addressbook piece a while ago, and couldn’t agree more.

-James

interesting and thoughtfull post. A few reactions:

“My mother never complains that she needs a better client for Amazon. ”

I never did either. 5 years ago I bought all my music through Amazon. Now I buy all my music through iTunes-a non browser rich client application. Whoops. Consumers rarely anticipate paradigm changes, but when someone offers a better experience (more reponsive, more engaging, easier to use, simpler, faster, richer, etc) they leap to it.

Who would have thought legions of coffee drinkers would happily jump from $.50 percolated coffee at Dunkin Donuts or McDs or home and spend $5 at Starbucks. Well, the folks at Starbucks did but I doubt many of their customers today thought they needed this ten years ago. People generally don’t anticipate paradigm changes, but they leap to better experiences.

The odds that any one visionary will predict a future paradigm correctly are of course very slim. But the odds that the current paradigms will persist as long as most people think are (IMO) zero.

Another example. I for one was a luddite when it came to cell phones for a long time. I figured, let phones be phones–I use it to call people. The idea that I would become proficient typing with a few fingers to send text messages would have been laughable to me a few years ago. Needless to say, I now use my phone more for data/text services than voice.

In Japan, the most advanced wireless phone infrastructure and ecosystem in the world, there is already a $1.6B (that is Billion) economy around FlashLite and FlashCast on Phones, in just a few years. Did people know in advance that the needed all of this rich client expeirences on their device?

“Put another way, I can’t say that I’m eagerly awaiting a future in which I need an Apollo runtime for one set of applications, an Eclipse runtime for another, a Java implementation for yet another, and a WPF/E runtime for yet another”

Exactly. Get the runtimes out of the way. That is what we are doing with the Flash Player and Apollo. When you use You tube, you use You Tube. You need not even know that it is executing in the Flash Player virtual machine. And that is how it should be. Let the content and the functionality be what the human uses. Outside of our small technogeek world who even knows what a “runtime” is? When I write documents in Buzzword (currently still in private alpha) I have no experience of using “Apollo”. I just interect with my content and friends who are commenting on the doc. Why should Firefox or IE or Apollo or Eclipse impose its brand, metaphor, chrome, etc on my “experience”. What value do they add for me or for Buzzword? The browser is a good metaphor for some things. Why does it need to be the right metaphor for all things?

The application I use the most hours per day at work is probably Acrobat Connect (formally Breeze). Why? I work in a remote office and am constantly communicating/collaborating with folks in other locations. This gives me a URL addressable space for real time collaboration and communication in a rich client. The browser plays a role–the URL bar gets me (and others) to my space, but beyond that has zero value to add. So why use it when the experience runs in a seamless cross platform rich client that is more ubiquitous than either Internet Explorer or Firefox?

Runtimes like Apollo will never replace the browser for all things, but for the things where the browser doesn’t add value, and the different metaphor does, why not let the apps and content be free?

As a publisher of applications, why have my experience and brand subservient to Internet Explorer or Firefox brands Their aims and brand are not (neccesarily) aligned with mine, why am I giving them top billing in my experience?

Just some quick reactions.

-David
Adobe

Best,
Brad Neuberg