Next of Web

I hope I don’t bore you guys over here in this post. This post is from my other blog. I work for a media/publishing company one of whose competitor is Google. Of course we are threatened by Google but our profits comparable if not better and more than them. Basically we are also search business but the difference between us and Google is that, we have our own data/content and google does not, google just has indexes and produces links to different site. Since we have our own data so when you search on our site you get premium and reliable data.. and of course it is paid service. Anyways Google has faster and may be somewhat better search engine than we have but we have better user interface and more helpful and user friendly features. I am not going into details of all that. I was in research team before I joined development; there we used to keep track of our competitors.

With recent announcement of Sun and Google tie-up and collaboration, the face of technology is going to change. Google has already started what is called as Web2.0. In this you get desktop like application in your web browser itself, Desktop applications have a richness and responsiveness that has seemed out of reach on the Web. The same simplicity that enabled the Web’s rapid proliferation also creates a gap between the experiences we can provide and the experiences users can get from a desktop application. The classic web application model works like this: Most user actions in the interface trigger an HTTP request back to a web server. The server does some processing — retrieving data, crunching numbers, talking to various legacy systems — and then returns an HTML page to the client. It’s a model adapted from the Web’s original use as a hypertext medium, but as fans of The Elements of User Experience know, what makes the Web good for hypertext doesn’t necessarily make it good for software applications.

This approach makes a lot of technical sense, but it doesn’t make for a great user experience. While the server is doing its thing, what’s the user doing? That’s right, waiting… looking at the hourglass..and at every step in a task, the user waits some more.
Obviously, if we were designing the Web from scratch for applications, we wouldn’t make users wait around. Once an interface is loaded, why should the user interaction come to a halt every time the application needs something from the server? In fact, why should the user see the application go to the server at all?

That gap is closing. Take a look at Google Suggest. Watch the way the suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly. Now look at Google Maps. Zoom in. Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit. Again, everything happens almost instantly, with no waiting for pages to reload.
Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications. With Sun, imagine the possibilities. You will have an application similar to MS office on web and that too my guess is will be free and open source. I think we will have openOffice online in near future. This will be a big blow for Microsoft because MS office is also an important revenue stream for them. My second guess is domination of IE as a web browser is going to end. We the developer community, have already moved to FireFox. More over last week we found out that around 10% of our users are using FireFox which some assume is more secure and has more and better features than IE. Of course MS is going to do something as always it will try to copy or crush the innovation. This time around they are trying to copy. Of course MS will have no problem in bringing Office collaboration on to web and crush out these online applications. They are going to reverse engineer Google and FireFox. For example again in IE 7.0 they are adding some of the features like tabbed browsing and may be support for GreaseMonkey
So in short Google will be the company that will define and redefine new technology. Check out AJAX and wait for everyone to follow it.