Web 2.0 21 Feb 2006 06:22 am
Sometimes Web 2.0 is Underkill
Foldera has an interesting product that looks to take a project-centric approach to organising information.
Whilst this has been tried in the past, Foldera might have finally reached the right balance — if only they were a desktop application. But they’re not; it’s a web app, albeit a pretty ajaxian one, and I think this is an example of basically choosing the wrong platform.
Maybe they didn’t want to challenge Outlook, maybe they thought zero-install was the only way to distribute a product now, maybe they thought businesses are just waiting for the right application before moving their most important data onto an unknown providers infrastructure, maybe they thought the small-just-starting-all-we-need-is-a-web-app (something I like to call the SJSAWNIAWA sector) is a big unknown “long-tail” market… But why hamstring terrific ideas like this with the scale, speed and privacy issues of a web app.
Web 2.0 has it’s advantages, but I think sometimes the allure of being part of a new generation of web applications blinds us to the practicalities of choosing ultimately what’s best for the user.
on 21 Feb 2006 at 7:47 pm 1. said …
[…] Following that, is it really that much of an advantage being strictly web-based? Wouldn’t its target user do just as well, if not better, with a seemingly faster desktop app? (Martin Wells cogitates) […]