Tim's WWW War!
Yes, that’s 4 dublya’s, and Tim’s only starting from what I can tell!
Tim’s post got me thinking, all to often the web grabs the latest darling technology and goes gung ho about how this will be “the one” to de-throne Microsoft and Office. Yet, when you think about why Office is so prevalent, it’s not because Microsoft used Godfather style tactics to get users to buy and/or use it (I’m sure Bill G isn’t running around the country side depositing horses heads in StarOffice users beds), it’s because it serves the users needs. And when Office no longer serves those needs, some other product will step into it’s place, and you’ll here the froth mouths go nuts about that too.
Tim also makes a good point about “traction”. Just look at SourceForge! There are 1000’s of projects (116,551 as of today) on there, and only a small percentage ever get taken up by someone outside of the project team. Why? Because they only satisfy the needs of a tiny group of people, so therefor, they never reach critical user mass. Again, why does this matter? Well, ultimately you want to gather as much feedback as you can from a diverse user base to influence the evolution of your product, to ultimately meet their needs. So without initial traction, your project or product will die of natural attrition. Hence why in 12 months, most of the YAAWP (yet another AJAX word processor) will contribute to the decaying detritus filling the WWW.
For example, take ajaxWrite (thanks JFM for the link ;)), it only supports FireFox! Wtf!? So how does ajaxWrite expect to exist by only supporting one browser? I thought that was the whole point of the Web 2.0 regurg’olution? Seamless experience? Uh huh!
Anyway, I’m willing to sign up for the WWW’W frontline! Where’s my AJAX toolkit?