Just found a very interesting application that illustrates the point that Adam Bosworth’s piece here makes (it’s a great piece, incidentally, so if you didn’t read it before I recommend it). As I talked about when I discussed the entry here, one of the conclusions that Adam draws is, in his own words, “the real value in my opinion has moved from the software to the information and the community.” What he calls ‘information and community’ I call more loosely ‘the network’, but I’m pretty confident that we’re more or less talking about the same thing (and I invite him to correct me if I’m wrong about that). He also says “I postulate, still, that 95% of the UI required for this world will be delivered over the browser.” As I covered then, I agree. Further, I was reminded of an old post of Tim Bray’s here which basically reaches a similar conclusion, saying:
On more than a few occasions—most recently in the context of Avalon—I’ve observed here that both IT admins and end-users prefer browser-based apps to traditional compiled clients, for everything except content creation. Every time, I get emails and incoming pointers from people saying “You just don’t get it, the Web interfaces are so tired, we really need a richer UI paradigm.” The interesting thing is that these reactions are always—every time, without exception—from developers. Not once has an end-user type person written in saying they wished they could have a richer interface like the kind they used to have in compiled desktop apps.
So put Adam and Tim’s conclusions together, and you get – or at least I do – that the browser is an important, critical application platform now, and will continue to be going forward.
That should hopefully explain why I still ascribe such importance to browser moves. Which in turn should explain why I’m watching Google’s browser moves very carefully, and am still completely at a loss to explain Microsoft’s decision to limit ongoing support and updates to IE to XP customers. So you’re probably saying to yourself, somewhat impatiently, ‘Great, I get that you think the browser’s important. Understood. That’s terrific. Got anything else for me?’
As it happens, I do. Those who pick up my feed may have already seen this in my del.icio.us links, but I offer up Amazon Light 4.0 as an example of what can be achieved with networked, composite applications.
On the one hand, it’s just an alternative interface to Amazon.com. One that doesn’t do a lot of what Amazon does. On the other, it’s an intriguing amalgamation of lightweight web services (small W, though I won’t get into the current WS-* backlash implications here) that together form a different, and in my view, superior, user experience. Amazon Light 4.0 grafts together Amazon, Gmail, Blogger, del.icio.us, Netflix and iTunes in some weird, monstrous, super-webapp. It’s at once less and a great deal more than Amazon.com is alone.
So what does this prove? Well, many things. But the point I’m drawing here, that supports the conclusions of Bosworth, Bray and others is that the value as always is in the network, not the software. If you still have trouble with that, ask yourself how valuable a Blackberry is in an area with no network. Or a cell phone.
When it comes to web apps, I’m not necessarily looking for a bigger, better mousetrap. I’m looking for a smarter mousetrap. The smartest mousetrap is not necessarily the one focused on its own widgets, it’s the one focused on the network. Whoever can give that to me, wins.
