Those of us who still, against all odds, harbor some fondness for the PalmOS platform were looking forward to today, when Palm founder Jeff Hawkins finally unveiled the super-duper mystery project he’s been working on for some time now.
It’s an overpriced, underpowered Linux laptop.
I’m underwhelmed and very disappointed.
I’m feeling cranky this week, so this will probably sound whiny, but another thing that bugs me about Web 2.0 is that the focus on web web web means that there’s a noticeable lack of innovation in desktop apps.
Unfortunately, man (or in this case, woman) does not live by webmail alone, especially when it comes to office e-mail. I have been through three different IMAP clients at work in recent months (Mail, Entourage, and Thunderbird) and am still not happy with my options.
Are there any other decent options for native Mac IMAP or do I just have to live with one of the above?
Shorter Michael Arrington: “Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn!”
Sounds like he is feeling burnt-out and needs to get away from the endless parade of CEOs begging him to cover their startup. And if that’s how he’s feeling, he really does need to take a break, because I lived through the last downturn and would rather not repeat that experience. We’re still recovering from the financial hits we took then.
Oh, and in a side note, as a member of the marketing profession, it always grinds my gears to hear somebody get nostalgic for the days when:
There were a few dozen new startups, though, and the people who were involved with them were largely here because they loved what they did. No one had marketing departments or PR firms.
As if people who work in high-tech marketing or PR do not also love technology and what they do? *sigh*
Recently, we started using Basecamp at the office to manage some current projects. It’s working out well for some things — to-do list management and assigning tasks, for example — and it’s certainly easier to use and has a much faster learning curve than Microsoft Project. Yet I am also very frustrated by the limitations — trying to actually edit a document in their whiteboard means giving up a lot of functionality that I take for granted, for example — and this was compounded by some server-side outages I ran into while working. Each outage was relatively brief (a minute or two, maybe), but it was no fun to be kicked out of flow and brought to a complete standstill each time they happened. I eventually finished the document in MS Word and dropped the finished text into the whiteboard, rather than risk further interruptions.
In short, as far as I’m concerned, this aspect of Web 2.0 is not as great as it’s cracked up to be. And according to Wired‘s Michael Calore I’m not the only one who feels that way:
In general, I found that the browser is perfectly suitable for a variety of daily office tasks — e-mail, writing and editing stories. I also lived through several technological breakdowns that had me pounding my desk in frustration, wondering what the hell I had gotten into.
Yep, that sounds about right.
But there’s more to this than the purely personal issue of having to unlearn years or even decades of computing habits. What frustrates me the most about the whole Web 2.0 ‘the browser is the application’ paradigm is how essentially unoriginal it is.
A lot of very talented and dedicated people are spending countless hours (and investment dollars) solving problems that have already been solved, and in some cases, solved very well. Look at TurboTax, to pick a handy tax-week example. It’s a great, absolutely best-of-breed application. How much time and treasure did it cost Intuit to port TurboTax to the web? What new stuff could they have done with those people and that money instead? We’ll never know.
What I would really love to see is people spending all that time, talent, and money on solving the problems that have NOT been solved yet. Search technology, for example. We’ve made some big strides in text-based search (although there is still much do do there too), but searching around graphics, video, or audio is lagging far behind. Or if you want to focus on web-based technology, can someone please come up with a cross-platform web conferencing system that doesn’t suck? Or, as Bruce Schneier pointed out in another Wired article, how about solving some of the security issues that still plague the computing world?
Wouldn’t it be great if Web 2.5 were about solving new problems, instead of re-solving the old ones?
So I was checking out rev2.org’s list of the Top 10 Most Successful Web 2.0 Startups to Date this morning, and noticed something interesting: Not one of them has IPOed or announced plans to do so. All of them have either been acquired by Web 1.0 companies (several of whom did IPO) or are still privately held.
The other interesting thing is that there’s no mention on the list of whether any of the companies is profitable (or was before acquisition). Wikipedia, being a non-profit, is off the hook there, but what about the others?
You’d think that after all the craziness in the last go-round, this time, any real definition of success would include some amount of actual profitability, but maybe I expect too much.
UPDATE 4/15 In comments on his site, rev2’s Sid clarifies:
Since most Web 2.0 companies are private and don’t release any information at all on profitability and revenues (with the exception of perhaps YouTube which we have some data on) I decided to leave that out. While I realize that’s one of the important things in terms of ‘most successful,’ Web 2.0 is really more about ‘who can get acquired for the most money’ than ‘who can make the most money.’ That was Web 1.0, and those companies are now the ones who are buying these.
Having lived through Web 1.0, I seem to recall it was all about the “eyeballs” and about IPOing as fast as possible, not about profitability, but hey, maybe old age has clouded my memory.
A month or so ago, I posted a blog entry noting that I was having a problem with comments vanishing when I posted to WordPress blogs. Thanks to the kind operator the Burbed blog, who listened to my complaints and took the time to do some testing, I finally have an answer to why my comments were vanishing into the aethir.
Apparently, my ‘handle’ of Fiat Lux is classed as ‘definitely spam’ by one of the common WordPress spam filters (presumably Akismet).
That’s moderately annoying, since I’m rather fond of that phrase.