stephan.com
scattered thoughts

The good ideas keep running around and around. A few years back, Sun’s Java threatened to unseat Microsoft from the lead with cross platform applications that would make an end run around their OS lock-in. The promise of that approach failed to materialize, mostly due to Java’s dreadful performance, ham-handed UI controls, and failure to be truly cross platform after all. A few such applications exist today, such as Limewire, but by and large the effort failed.

Fast forward to 2006, where a handful of companies are making inroads with truly compelling Web 2.0 applications that attack not the application space, but the task space of user needs. Although there are some clear stumbling blocks in the road, I think this approach just might work, because it relies on a simple principle:

solving the problem

A great many worthy and well funded efforts fail because they are focused on providing a technology, rather than solving a problem. By way of parable, I’ll relate a personal anecdote: while living in Finland, I once had to find an address in Helsinki from emailed directions. I shivered in the cold, struggling to read the screen on my smartphone, and I wished that I could read my email on my glasses, so I wouldn’t have to dig my phone out. But reading an email in the snow wasn’t the problem - the problem was finding an address. As long as I was wishing, why not wish for an arrow in my glasses that pointed me the right way?

That would be solving the problem.

The old vision of Java applications - or even current projects like Open Office - is focused on technology, as in “let’s make a word processor that is compatible with Microsoft Word.” Why bother replicating Word, or reading and writing its file format? The main reason for doing that is to be compatible with other users to enable collaboration. So why not just solve that problem? There are two exciting new Web 2.0 applications that are focused on precisely this problem, Writeboard and Writely.

Writeboard is part of the 37signals suite of collaboration applications, including Basecamp and Backpack. Like the rest of their projects, Writeboard offers a clean, uncluttered user interface focused on the essence of collaborative writing - generating text and keeping a version history. The editing window is spartan, offering no interactive formatting, instead using the 1980’s trick of inline characters to specify a few minimal options - for example, *hello* comes out as hello, and _goodbye_ becomes goodbye.

Writeboard can in no way be confused with a true word processor - there are no columns, no fonts, and the results can only be exported as raw text or HTML. But those things are beside the ultimate point of online collaboration - if you’re drafting a press release, working on a design document, or drafting a manifesto, what matters is the content, not the presentation. Writeboard is the simplest tool for the job, manageable and clear.

In contrast with Writeboard’s spartan interface and feature set, Writely offers a fully featured browser based word processor experience. The toolbar is familiar, and offers a fairly full set of options, such as text styling, fonts and tables, even footnotes. Files may be uploaded and exported in popular formats such as Word, Open Office, and RTF, and a premium offering adds PDF export. Writely can also publish directly to popular blogging clients. Collaboration and version control are still evolving, but seem to be on a par with anything else out there.

Writely is a great product, offering a zero-cost, zero-overhead alternative to the dominant word processor, with the added bonus of immunity to crashed hard drives, operating system glitches, malware, and lost USB keys. For 95% of users, there is now no reason to invest in a word processing application - Writely provides all of the needed functionality. With all its bells and whistles, however, it seems like Writely somehow misses the point, focusing on the details of copying the desktop experience while missing the opportunity to break new ground.

There are host of other great web based applications providing traditional desktop functionality with online accessibility and social features, including calendars (30 Boxes, HipCal, CalendarHub, kiko, Spongecell), to-do lists (Remember the Milk, Ta-da Lists, voo2do, SproutLiner), even weirdos like Mayomi mind-mapping.

With email and word processing available in the browser, it seems surprising that only one small company, NumSum, seems to be going after spreadsheets. An online spreadsheet should be capable of amazing things, like interacting directly with raw data from RSS/XML sources. It is less surprising that there are no competitors in the space presently dominated by Powerpoint - after all, when your team is already on the same page with something like Basecamp, who needs to make presentations?

There are some who dismiss Web 2.0 as a short round of buzzword bingo, but it seems to me there is some authentic new thinking here.