Thursday, February 13, 2003

Broadband Clients ....Yet the dial-up guys have failed to decouple access from services, as demonstrated by the fact that AOL has only 650,000 broadband subscribers while its corporate sibling Road Runner, the Time Warner Cable broadband service, has 2.6 million customers. What's on at AOL or MSN isn't catching the audience's attention. Yahoo! gains have been primarily on marketing of broadband, and that will exhaust itself as a source of growth; the company hasn't delivered a "skin" yet -- and what I've seen in beta isn't very interesting, either. The unexpected will decide this market. That is, someone is going to come up with an engaging client that turns broadband into a symphony of excitement people will flock to. And, frankly, that game is still wide open to all the players, dial-up laggards included. Microsoft is living proof that the slow and steady often wins the war. [via RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]    Mitch is right on the money here.  I have yet to see a "broadband client experience" in its wholeness, across all the fundamental applications people currently use, and a vision for a suite of services and experiences that transform consumer experience online.  While I do suspect it will be an evolutionary process, I'd expect to see smaller, younger companies focused on this opportunity with the real breakthrough ideas.   8:53:57 AM    comment []

Servers / Clients/ Centralization The center of nowhere in particular Mitch Kapor blogs eloquently on the design issues that come with building a workgroup product for an organization. While the OSAF's Chandler is a P2P-based product at heart, and Mitch a decentralizer at heart, when it comes to big groups, servers become sort of important. But is a server centralization? Especially if local repositories on the users' PCs are full of almost all the same information? I asked a purposefully dumb question of David Isenberg about this at Supernova last December, about his the end of the middle presentation, which show lots of clients but no servers (literally, pictures of PCs at the edge of the network -- not the graphic on the linked page, but in his slides). His response, which I don't think comes through adequately in the presentation, is that a server is just another client -- and I'd add, it's a client with an institutional memory. [via RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]   This is always an interesting discussion.  I've advocated on both ends of the spectrum.  When the Web emerged, the web application server solved enormous issues for end-users and organizations.  It's server-based quasi-centralized (yet still distributed) model was enormously cost effective and convenient for end-users.  But it also lacked some of the richness that end-user applicaitons require (media, ui fidelity, real-time aspects, using the local desktop), and so we've seen the advent of 'rich clients' that move a greater amount of processing to desktops.  But even in this newer (rich Internet apps) model it's very much a cooperative relationship and balance between edge clients and middleware.   Just like in matters of religion and politics, I don't think there's one answer --- varying conditions inside corporations, device capabilitieis, network conditions, security infrastructure (firewalls), bandwidth, etc. all drive different architectures for application distribution and communications.   8:45:44 AM    comment []