Tag: Technology

On Web 2.0 and Unoriginality Redux

I’ve been feeling very much in the minority this week. First off, Google launched their new Street View. By and large, the tech community seems to love it. Me, I feel very, very uncomfortable that someone can sit at their leisure at their desk, call up a highly detailed photo of the outside of my home, and view it from any number of different angles, all without having to be on the scene. But clearly, I’m missing something, because just about everyone else seems to think it’s uber-cool, or at the very least, slick.

Now, Google is introducing Google Gears, and I am similarly unimpressed. Off-line access to web-based apps is one of the big issues for web-based computing, and it was only a matter of time before someone filled that rather obvious gap. However, solving that problem only brings another one into focus — web based apps don’t have even a remotely comparable feature set as their desktop-based rivals in some rather vital areas. Sure, it’s great that your feed reader will work on an airplane, but Google Docs is not even close to being a good replacement for MS Word.

And this brings me back to some comments I made about Web 2.0 just last month:

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 to 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?

Maybe, as with Street View, there’s something to Google Gears that I am just not seeing. Maybe all those big honking piles of desktop code really do need to be replaced with slightly less big honking piles of Ajaxifed XML and JavaScript.

Maybe I need an attitude adjustment, or just a vacation.

Or maybe not. Maybe I’m right, and we need new solutions to new problems much more than we need more solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Trendspotting: FOG / DOG

Robert Scoble reads his feeds and notices that Fear of Google / Distrust of Google is growing.

I have no idea if Google is evil or not – I like to think they are not, but I don’t have any knowledge one way or the other – but I completely agree that Google’s public face is not helping matters.

Scoble’s whole piece is good, but the closing comment is particularly apt:

I think Google has to be very transparent, very warm, and very open when it comes to privacy and the data it’s collecting on all of us and to many of us it’s coming across as closed, cold, and opaque. That leads to bad PR. Bad PR — if continued unabated — leads to government action. Just ask my friends at Microsoft.

Indeed.

Someone Needs to Reinvent Mail

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?

Arrington’s Feeling Burnt Out

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*

Now It Gets Interesting

Looks like someone is finally going to offer iTunes some real competition. Amazon has a press release out announcing that it:

will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels. EMI Music’s digital catalog is the latest addition to the store. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. Amazon’s DRM-free MP3s will free customers to play their music on virtually any of their personal devices — including PCs, Macs(TM), iPods(TM), Zunes(TM), Zens(TM) — and to burn songs to CDs for personal use.

“Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO.

I’ve been happily buying music from iTunes because they have most of the music I want, at what I consider a fair price, with DRM that’s at least manageable. If I can get all that without any DRM, well, that would be even more awesome.

I’m not surprised Amazon is doing this. They’re one of the few companies big enough to stand up to the recoding industry and push back against their ridiculous demands. And if Amazon can get a decent selection of music available, then this will be a major shot across the bow of Apple.