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?