 Wednesday, July 21, 2004
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Here's a great story about an Apollo 11 experiment still running -- on the moon:
Ringed by footprints, sitting in the moondust, lies a 2-foot wide panel studded with 100 mirrors pointing at Earth: the "lunar laser ranging retroreflector array." Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong put it there on July 21, 1969, about an hour before the end of their final moonwalk. Thirty-five years later, it's the only Apollo science experiment still running.
Thirty-five years today!
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Back in December we wrote about the VeriChip, a small RFID device that's implanted in the skin.
Yup, that's right, your skin, my friend:
Once implanted just under the skin, via a quick, painless outpatient procedure (much like getting a shot), the VeriChip can be scanned when necessary with a proprietary VeriChip scanner.
At the time, we thought of all sorts of nightmare scenarios for this technology. Jordan Stedman who's been following this dropped us a long and thought-provoking email with some more, the worst of which is this sort of device becoming an electronic version of the yellow star the Nazis used.
Check it out, and then imagine how technically naive the movie Minority Report was: retina scans, how -- quaint!
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Phil Wainewright's on an anti-rich client jihad these days, which is a bit of a shame since his commentaries on enterprise software and service-oriented architectures are usually so insightful.
Phil points to a very interesting post by Lotus employee Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah, who talks about IBM's acquisition of AlphaBlox/Halfbrain. These DHTML/Javascript apps are the basis for the browser-based "productivity components" that now ship with Lotus Workplace: an entirely browser-based spreadsheet, rich text editor, and presentation "mini-suite" if you will.
Phil and Koranteng are both mightily impressed by the technical achievement of such a thing, and I have to admit, so am I -- writing a spreadsheet in DHTML and JavaScript, with a dearth of programming aids...well, no question these guys are Iron Programmers.
But: so what?
Now I think I have some small insight into this. I wrote the Java version of 1-2-3 nearly a decade ago, which I ported to an applet model (this was the inspiration for Lotus eSuite).
Many thought browser-based delivery was the wave of the future -- zero-install, low TCO, blah, blah, blah. But here's the deal, and unfortunately only a few of us recognized it then: nobody wants spreadsheets or for that matter, rich content creation apps generally, delivered in a browser! If you're going to interact with a web page, we realized, you want -- a purchase order or an expense report, or an approval form -- not a blank spreadsheet!
You can see this even now: odds are you're running Windows and IE, and I bet you've never run a spreadsheet ActiveX in your browser, even though there are lots of these available. Obviously it's not exactly the same thing -- ActiveX's do get installed; the point however is that they can run in the browser window. You have to ask yourself: what's the value of a blank spreadsheet inside my browser? Conversely: if desktop-apps-inside-browsers are so compelling -- where are they?
On the other hand, you've almost certainly run pages that "calculate" -- an custom intranet expense report app, or maybe Dell's online configurator. You use your desktop spreadsheet app all the time -- but you didn't need it inside your browser. (Now where this gets really interesting is when you run the spreadsheet engine on the server -- another one of my pet prototyping projects years and years ago -- that's a separate story though).
Unfortunately, IBM doesn't seem to recognized any of this. Browsers and desktops are different; the apps that live on them conform to entirely different, and coequal, usage styles.
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Jun Aug
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