Thursday, December 14th, 2006
Bill Gates on Web Apps
Category: Business
, Microsoft, Usability
If you’ve read any tech news in the past 24 hours, you’ll now be familiar with the meeting Bill Gates held among influential bloggers, ahead of next year’s Mix conference. Aside from learning what’s on Bill’s Zune, we get to hear his views on the future of web apps, thanks to a question from Liz Gannes. She asked him which apps should live in the browser and which should not, one of the key questions in Ajax and one we have touched on in the past.
He replied that the distinction would come to be silly from a technical standpoint, but that the necessary movement toward web APIs does present challenges on the business side. “One of the things that’s actually held the industry back on this is, if you have an advertising business model, then you don’t want to expose your capabilities as a web service, because somebody would use that web service without plastering your ad up next to the thing.â€
His solution wasn’t very specific: “It’s ideal if you get business models that don’t force someone to say ‘no, we won’t give you that service unless you display something right there on that home page.â€
Then for the tease: “And, you know, [inside the browser and outside the browser are] moving towards each other, but there’s still a bit of a barrier there, and new technology, things we’re working on, really will change that.â€
Sounds like Bill forgot his cheat sheet on new Microsoft technologies to give a clearer answer on the split between browser based and client applications. Surely he should have said that for consumer and small business web applications APIs are unlikely as costs are subsidised by advertising, but that for most Microsoft server and business applications like Sharepoint, they already include very mature web APIs. And the “tease” mentioned is surely a reference to WPF Everywhere with XAML and C# apps direct in (any) browser - the very exciting prospect of an end-to-end development platform that Flash/FLEX could never offer!
I use to think Bill Gates was a visionary. Its been painfully obvious now for about 6 years he wasn’t ever a visionary, just someone who could exploit things/people/companies. Its his company and browser that is hindering the web more than any other single thing. (not supporting the canvas tag, flaky CSS support, etc., etc.)
“his company and browser that is hindering the web”… the pace of Web 2.0 development, which is a pretty blistering pace anyway, is hardly set back by CSS rendering bugs. Surely it’s the lack of tangible business models and the pace of change in web advertising.
“is hardly set back by CSS rendering bugs”
Which is why I put the “etc.”. I hate to have to go into all the details of why Internet Explorer is hindering developers, but here it goes.
1. Actually CSS rendering is a major issue, ask any designer or web developer that has to make sites work on IE, Firefox, Safari, etc. Chances are good its usually IE that has the most problems.
2. How about the AJAX caching issue mentioned here on Ajaxian?
http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-ie-caching-issue
3. No support of the Canvas tag, this one hinders me in particular
4. Non-compliance with their version of Javascript to the currentr standards
5. Complete lack of security in IE hurts. Sorry but allowing ActiveX controls to install themselves without user approval (now fixed) was completely unacceptable. Security is an ongoing problem with IE and its usually tied into ActiveX and usually very serious. Not to mention the numerous buffer overflow issues they have.
6. Lack of support for XHTML, heck for that matter lack of support for HTML 4.01. They support what they feel like - nothing more.
I know it is really fashionable to bash IE, but let’s not forgot that great contributions:
They introduced innerHTML, this is extremely powerful and useful solution for many problems.
They also were the first to introduce the xml http request object that is the foundation of Ajax. While the technique they used was propietary, there was not standard at the time, it had to be propeitary.
Also, the IE Ajax caching is not a serious issue. Caching GETs is foundational to the REST principle of HTTP. IE does have issues with being over aggresive with caching, but the workarounds are trivial.
On the otherhand, a couple of the major tragedies of IE, that I believe are just as significant setbacks to the web industry (that have less trivial solutions):
The Dom reference counting/memory leak bug. This not only leads to memory leaks, but the solutions to avoiding the leaks often lead to poorly structured JavaScript code. Using closures for event handling is much better code style, but leads to memory leaks.
The PNG bug. PNG is a great format, and is the only one (of JPEG, GIF and PNG) that supports that semi-transparency. It is a real shame that the web industry has not really been able to take advantage of this format for the most part. I really there is a JS fix for this, but it is quite a hack.
Ahah, the canvas tag. I’m suprised by the number of posts on Ajaxian that are regarding drawing and layout editing. This is central to “which apps should live in the browser and which should not”. Personal opinion, use a client app or plugin if it needs that rich a UI. (And I speak as a web developer.) Let XHTML stick to being semantic text based content and running great (forms and some multimedia based) social/collaborative apps. We are hardly at zenith regarding usability and data APIs, let alone trying to get web pages to render content they were perhaps never intended to do.
Bill who?
Just ignore him, he’s on the way out, thank god
The future of the web is in the hands of mozilla, opera, apple, yahoo and google. The rest can just wait and adapt.
This is a very old-fashioned discussion and “what should go in the browser and what in a desktop application” is a strange question to ask; as Gates says, it’s just “silly” from a technical standpoint. And to add a further dimension, I believe that the _user_ should also have a hand in answering the question of ‘where’, not just the developer.
Whilst the browser is certainly a useful application for following your nose and saving references to some of the places you’ve been, a desktop application has the advantage that it can be controlled independently of other applications, has no clutter like address bars and big buttons that are not relevant to some specific task in hand, can be left open all day–perhaps docked to the side of screen and auto-hiding when you move the mouse away–could even be partly transparent, so that it takes on some odd shape!
So given that that standalone desktop applications are preferable for just about every task other than surfing the web, why shouldn’t I be able to take any HTML pages that I quite like, and run them as if they were purpose-built desktop applications? There are plenty of useful pages out there that do things like show me the times of the next trains at my local station; I should be able to take the URL, wrap it in an application container, and let it sit on my desktop.
And further, by runing that container from the command-line, I could open any number of these ‘desktop web applications’ with shortcuts or batch files. And by passing parameters on the command-line, I should even be able to control the position and size of the window, its docking and auto-hide behaviour, whether it’s transparent or not, and so on.
And in fact, this is exactly what we’ve created with Sidewinder. I’m certainly not trying not to make this post about ’self-promotion’ because I think these are very interesting and important topics to discuss. But it’s difficult to avoid mentioning Sidewinder since its whole raison d’etre is to blur the distinction between a web-based web application viewed through a browser, and the same app presented as a desktop-bound one. Anyway, I’ve left it to the end so that for those not interested in reading more on this topic (or in seeing screenshots or downloading software), you need read no further.
For anyone still here, we have a ‘how to’ that shows the Adobe Flex Flexstore demo running as a desktop application (but still on their servers). There are some screenshots in that article, should you not wish to install anything, but if you do install Sidewinder you can try exactly the same approach and load any of your favourite web-sites as desktop applications…all without programming.
Regards,
Mark Birbeck
http://skimstone.x-port.net/
@ scriptkiddie:
I wish that were true. However, Andy is right: this is all about WPF/E. We’re about a year away from MS’ overwhelming push for WPF/E. Once that starts, it’s going to be very, very hard for anyone — even Google — to save the openness of the web as we know it.
Supporting Openlaszlo may be one way to resist the onslaught. http://www.openlaszlo.org/.
What do you expect from Bill with profit as the first priority? Browser is leading the behaviour of the online user and will create the marketing need in the future to be target by “marketers” - with Apps Web in mind. Market leader talks and you listen… you can choose to follow the trend or die out soon!