My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

Curves

tech
by Antonio on

Back at the beginning of the dot-com boom I worked for in BCG's high tech practice. There was a partner there that spent most of his time talking up big concepts like "disintermediation" and "realignment of value chains." Sometimes it was so thick that you could cut the bull with a knife.

But there was one slide in the various PowerPoint presentations he would give that stuck with me. Riffing on the theme of worse-is-better he would talk about how web technologies, while less powerful than those that came before in the client-server world (CORBA anyone?), had tremendous reach and that this was what made them unique. He would then present the most sensual of asymptotic graphs:

We had given up all of this richness but in return we got the kind of reach that really helped IT become ubiquitously useful, or so the story went.

I wasn't the only one who got stuck on that graph because pretty soon every nerd in the high-tech practice was going on about everything was a trade-off between richness and reach from the lunch venues near our office to the reward points earned during business travel (to this day I wonder whether a lot of the richness-reach lure doesn't go directly back to some monkey affinity for asymptotic curves. See the latest craze on the economics of media if you don't believe me).

Anyway, the one place where I (and a bunch of others) have continued to apply this richness/reach tradeoff has been in client applications. Until recently, any need for a rich user interface was always relegated to the fat client. At my current job, I spend about 35% of my time managing the development of a Win32 book layout tool because when the company looked at the marketplace two and a half years ago it decided that the online photo sites (Shutterfly, oFoto, and Snapfish) were not nearly as adept at allowing people to make photo albums than the fat client applications (iPhoto and Picasa). This was probably the right call (right before my time) but it has turned out to be a real pain from a development perspective: releases happen at what is now considered a glacial pace (one every 4 months), we never do enough platform testing (12 OS/browser combinations), and bugs are hard to fix due to people's unwillingness to auto update.

Which gets me to my point: the recent naming of what Google has shown the world we can now do with modern browsers (AJAX) has unleashed a torrent of energy from hackers that have been for a long time sliding up and down the same richness-reach curve that we were on when we embarked on BookMaker. XMLHttpRequest and all of its supporting cast of technologies has changed the curve to look like this:

This will not eliminate the need for rich applications: everyone's favorite example is always, who wants to run a DHTML version of Photoshop? But it will change the point at which we reach for VC++ and MFC. And that-- for those of us who have spent some time mired in that Windows client hell-- is a truly wonderful thing.