I just had a moment of epiphany when I realized, once again, why web based applications rule -- even at home when Outlook is "available". For a lot of us, we use web based applications like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Calendar, etc when we travel but revert to a full Outlook / Entourage / whatever in our office. Well here I was, at my office (also my living room but let's not go there, shall we?), and it was one of those situations we've all seen too often -- my computer stopped responding. Just one of those mysterious circumstances where nothing I do is doing anything. We've all seen it and short of a restart, there isn't really anything to do except wait. And I knew that waiting would clear it up -- there was just some kind of system level thingie gone wrong (ain't it fun to talk geeky?). So I was waiting. And waiting. And the phone rang! Cool! Distraction. Oops -- it was a new client wanting me to go to her office and discuss a project.
That's right! I needed my calendar. And I knew that my machine wasn't going to do it. So I turned to my Linux laptop and went to the url for my web based calendar. And scheduled the appointment. If I had been using Outlook then I would have either had to a) go by memory (bad) or b) admit that even my computer was dead (embarassing). Quite honestly neither of those approaches would have been acceptable. As much as I like the rich GUI of something like Outlook, these attributes matter more to me:
- Reliability
- Ubiquitous Accessibility to My Data
- Predictability
Unfortunately conventional or "fat client" based applications fail on all these attributes i.e.
- Reliability? Even running under something like OS X, applications still crash more than we like. And Windows 2000 / Fill In Windows Version Here is pretty much a joke for reliability.
- Predictability? Conventional applications just aren't predictable. Change to a friends computer and the software might be different. Or your computer will hang for a period of time -- you know it will come back but not when.
- Ubiquitous Accessibility to My Data? Sure -- if your machine is always reliable, always with you, always turned on, always networked, your data is accessible. Unfortunately that is all too often not the case. Machines aren't reliable; we don't want to carry even a laptop everywhere we go; and networking is hard.
The real problem here is that the expectations of the customer have outstripped the ability of conventional applications to deliver. Now that we are much more connected, we want computers and our data to be like a telephone -- always on and always working. Sure telephones don't have rich interfaces but they succeed on the criteria of Reliability and Predictability. Since phones don't store data, it's not fair to grade them on the third criteria. And conventional applications are just not there yet and they may never be -- they aren't designed for it. Web based applications, for all their myriad flaws, are designed for this always networked world and that's why they rule. We're only now starting to see rich DHTML based user interfaces that give us the power of fat clients. www.oddpost.com is one such user interface. But there will be more.
Note: I'm aware that not everyone is lucky enough to have a 2nd machine sitting around. But, if I was in a real office setting, I could have gone to the cube next to me and done the same thing with a web browser. The analogy still works. And web applications still rule.
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