Pinderkent

Scott Rosenberg recently wrote about how it appears to take an AJAX-based Web application about five years to mature. The examples he gives include the new Yahoo! Mail interface, as well as the new Bloglines design. But I don't think he's looking far enough into the situation.

While it may take an AJAX-based Web application five years to mature, what we have to focus on is the end result after those five years. After that amount of time, one would expect there to be significant improvements over what was available five years earlier. But that's often not what we see with AJAX-based applications. While there might be some small improvement over the previous Web-based interface, there's still usually a major gap between the Web application and an equivalent desktop-based app.

The new Yahoo! Mail interface is a really good example of this. From my use of it so far, it looks like a lot of time and effort was spent working on it. Yet I think it was mostly in vain. It still just can't compete with actual email clients, such as Thunderbird or KMail. For most scenarios, using Pine or mutt (over SSH for remote access) is even faster and more efficient.

So it seems pointless to me to spend four or five years developing a Web-based application, especially when it will only really be equivalent to desktop applications from a decade earlier, if it even manages that. If Web applications allowed for easier, more rapid development, which in turn allowed for more innovative products to be created, then it'd be worth it. But that just isn't the case. We don't really see any innovation; we merely see poorly-done reimplementations of decade-old desktop software.