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March 23, 2006
Ajax marketing milestone
Ajax marketing milestone: There's now a product named "ajaxWrite". We've seen "Ajax" name in frameworks and libraries, but this may be the first tool aimed at normal people which has the very successful marketing label in its name. More reaction to the in-browser doc editor is at Memeorandum... I was more interested in the name itself than whatever it does. (btw, I gag when I hear people go Ajax-triumphant like this... hate it when people use the verbal shortcut "Ajax" to describe something attractive in a web browser. It would be more accurate to say "the deployed browsers' varying implementations of the ECMAScript interactivity language, along with HTML and CSS implementations, and the 'evil, proprietary' XmlHttpRequest introduced by Microsoft last decade but accepted by Firefox-friendly webInfluentials as 'web standards' now". Okay, well "Ajax" fits better in a sentence, but still.... ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at March 23, 2006 08:32 AM
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I just checked the source article (I posted because I was impressed by seeing the name "ajaxWrite" on Memeorandum), and it seems mostly a long promo from the creator. One part stuck out: "The impact of this shift in how software is delivered to users cannot be understated. First and foremost, we're blowing up the economic model that companies like Microsoft and Adobe have built their empires around - selling packaged software for big dollar amounts."
Excuse me for being intemperate, but what an idiot. You can manipulate text like MSWord and Excel right now, and think that gives you Photoshop, AfterEffects, or Acrobat printing capabilities? Whatever, jack... stuff like this is a big reason I've been minimizing my own blogging lately, because as a "corporate blogger" I've got a responsibility to how my partners are perceived as well as how I'm perceived, and I can't risk souring a business relationship just because someone we're trying to reach out to said something stupid against us.
But maybe Robertson actually meant something like "Someday, (maybe with CANVAS tags?), we'll be able to write JavaScript to invoke the audience's various browsers to do redeye removal of photos on Flickr, but of course the local native-code Photoshop environment offers way beyond that". Maybe that's what he meant when he said "blowing up the economic model of greedy companies like adobe". Well, maybe.... ;-)
Posted by: John Dowdell at March 23, 2006 09:26 AM
One more observation... most of the commentators on Memeorandum seem to have "what a bunch of hype" reactions too... restores my faith in humanity, that does.... ;-)
But when people were doing live server-to-browser data transfers with Flash in the late 90s I never heard anyone say that they "will replace Microsoft's business model".
Some people today (not most, but some) are using the magical label "ajax" as a way to delude themselves. Just Say No, pal... I live in the Haight-Ashbury, and daily see people who have hallucinated too much....
Posted by: John Dowdell at March 23, 2006 09:42 AM
Haha, fun and true post JD. Hope all is well.
Posted by: Chris Charlton at March 23, 2006 09:44 AM
Okay, one more, so long as I'm procrastinating on getting into the office... "TDavid" at "Make You Go Hmm" weblog also hits the psychotropic analogy up top, and later touches on occasional connectivity, offline use: "Will this work on an airplane? Most flights, no. Despite a few airlines offering internet access most still don't. So for business people wanting to write letters will Writely, AJAXwrite and the rest of the online wordprocessor apps help? No."
This is one of the areas explored by Macromedia Central a few years ago (for Flash work), and the upcoming-yet-still-mysterious Apollo project is aiming at this and also smooth browser/pdf/swf integration. I don't know if its data-synchronization or local storage can expand to Writely and "ajax word processors", but am hoping it may. However the 1.0 plays out, there's work being done which might eventually lead to straight Ajax apps having offline use, local persistence & online synchronization, delivered in a timeframe shorter than all the varying browser implementations are capable.
(Best place to keep an eye for Apollo news will be at Mike Chambers' place, because he's on the Apollo workgroup and also has a history of blognews.)
Posted by: John Dowdell at March 23, 2006 10:09 AM
Currently AjaxWrite is made in XUL. I'm curious to see if the IE version of AjaxWrite can be so responsive. IMHO for the time being the best ajax application I have ever seen are made in xul as the XUL Browser (http://faser.net/mab) or the XUL File manager (http://filemanager.mozdev.org/).
Native widgets are more responsive than the DHTML widgets.
Posted by: Jerome at March 24, 2006 01:03 AM