There’s an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal about AJAX.
The tone is wide-eyed and reveals the writer’s naivete, but it highlights some interesting things.
VCs are clearly going ga-ga over AJAX apps, despite knowing they’re not going to completely replace the desktop. Equally importantly, startups’ core product quality is being overlooked in the quest for AJAX (see next point). For example, Kiko, the Paul Graham funded calendar startup is highlighted, apparently purely because AJAX is a big part of their agenda. More established, better featured calendaring systems (I’m going to post a list separately at some point) such as Planzo and CalendarHub are not.
It’s nice to see Microsoft getting due credit for creating AJAX, and OWA being acknowledged as an early, extremely high-quality webapp (I was just using it again today — it literally puts most apps to shame, even today). MS gets bashed all the time, often for good reason, but to be fair they’ve done many cool things. They just haven’t done themselves any favours with their attitude.
The CEO of Zimbra makes a comment about halfway down that AJAX apps are more secure than desktop apps. Obviously, there are inherent risks to sharing data over the network, so I disagree with that generalisation. Also, in as far as AJAX data is not cached locally like full webpages are, I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing. In my opinion full webpages have a distinct advantage in that it’s always fully obvious what is going to happen when you click a link/button, and what you got back. That’s part of the open culture of the web, and the ‘AJAX effect’ — doing things in a way that’s seamless/invisible to the user — runs counter to it. I’m not sure at all that it’s a net positive.
The article attributes a comment to Google’s Bret Taylor, that AJAX makes webapps ‘reduce the cost and time to build programs’. I’m going to put this down to overzealousness on the part of the journalist — no self-respecting geek would make that comment.
The author mentions a frenzy over social-networking startups a few years ago (highlighted, inevitably, by Friendster). It’s a little strange (I deleted ’sad’) that social-networking is again becoming the product of choice for small startups. Or is it that we’ve finally built a critical mass of users for these products? (I’m going to have to post about this at some point too — witness Altavista vs. Google, Friendster vs. Orkut, MS Hailstorm vs. Google Base and others, MS Passport vs. Magic Carpet, Liberty Alliance, InfoCard — in each scenario, the very-cool-idea has had to wait till users were ready to receive it.)
Worth mentioning that one of Mr.Taylor’s verbatim quotes tickled my pedantic bone: ‘”All of the sudden, I’m interacting more with that site [NetFlix] and am a happy customer as a result,” Mr. Taylor says.’
It’s ‘all of a sudden’, dude!
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