Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s COO: The Value in Volume (this was posted Saturday, and definitely teases us about what’s coming today).
Some things here caught my attention.
“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.)”
Tim Bray, also at Sun, goes further: “Most ordinary database-backed business apps have migrated into the browser and they�re not coming back, no matter how great Windows Vista is.”
I wonder what kind of business world Tim is hanging out in? It sure doesn’t match the one I’ve seen. Heck, the London Train Station is still running on a character-mode app (modern way to say DOS).
And, you all should talk with Billy Hollis. He has story after story of businesses he’s worked with who went to Web for things like call centers that came back. Why? Productivity. Turns out it’s still more productive to use a well-designed application than something that fits into a Web browser.
But, watch the world jump on the hype. Even me. I’m a Web guy. I live on the Web. I love 37 Signals with the best of them. I think Tim O’Reilly’s a swell guy. I still have the Google toolbar loaded (don’t tell Ballmer, though, heheh).
But, we have one of the world’s best done AJAX apps in the world (the Web version of Outlook). It’s awesome. Everyone I show that to says “Microsoft did that? Wow!” Yet I wouldn’t trade that for the real Outlook for anything. Why? Well, the real Outlook works offline. The real one is far easier to manipulate. The real one looks better. The real one doesn’t go away if I accidentally hit refresh (or, worse, walk out of network range).
But, the world +is+ changing. There is a lot of change under foot here at Microsoft. This is the time when careers are made or lost. In a few minutes I’m gonna put up the tour of the Computer History Museum over on Channel 9 (it’s a great tour). In there you’ll see a bunch of names that were on top of the world 15 years ago. Will Microsoft be in a museum in 15 more years?
Sun and Google will definitely be writing our impending death again tomorrow. I’ll let them have their fun believing they are bricking us over with their services strategy. It’ll be a fun day.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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