WebAppetizer 1.0
Big news in the Web 2.0 world today. Google announced a new framework called Google Gears, which allows your web applications to save and retrieve stuff even when you’re not online. This online-only limitation has been a huge Achilles heel for the web app industry so far, and one of the major reasons that Google Apps — in its current form — has no chance of even denting Microsoft’s dominance in the office wars.
But it’s only a first step. It’ll probably be a year before the major vendors start pushing out viable disconnected web applications, and a couple of years more before they gain any traction in the market. There’s a better way. I call it WebAppetezier 1.0 (BETA).
WebAppetizer is a service that installs itself quietly on your machine, and then goes out and looks for all desktop applications that save and retrieve data locally. And then the magic happens — it modifies those apps so that they cannot save or load any data unless the machine is connected to the web. So your word processors, spreadsheets, photo editors, music players, etc won’t do anything useful unless you’re online. The data’s still there, just inaccessible. It’ll be exactly like using a web app, except much more annoying.
I’m a little surprised no one’s thought of this before, actually. It seems like an obvious solution — just a different way of looking at the problem, really. Mostly, people try to fix deficiencies in their products by making them as good as, or better than, the competition. Why not, instead, just make everyone else as bad as you? It saves time and effort.
Of course, this technique will only work for Windows computers outfitted with Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is an excellent delivery mechanisms for programs like this one — the kind that need to be installed automatically, without the user even knowing about it. Why bother all those busy people with details on how we’re making web applications a viable alternative in today’s industry. Just do it!
I see that Google just spent $3 billion to buy DoubleClick, another product that quietly does stuff to users that they don’t know about in order to make money for other people. I’d be willing to sell Google my product for a tenth of that price. Given the amount of money I’ll be saving them in R&D, development, and advertising, I think that’s a bargain.
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