Purplevision

As I have been job searching, someone asked me what my "dream job" would be if I worked at Google. To answer them, I found myself thinking again about web-applications and software as a service (SAAS).

small is the new big

For many years, companies like Microsoft have been building productivity software, like Word and Excel, bigger and bigger. Microsoft and Adobe and others have been adding more and more features to make ever larger, more complex products.

At first this was a welcome development as the products really lacked the features people wanted but over time the products have become mature. Fewer and fewer people use the new features and one could argue that the emphasis has become providing a recurring revenue stream less than providing customer value.

The recent efforts to create web-only versions of office software is a trend in the opposite direction. Instead of building massive applications, folks are trying to isolate the key features necessary and build very small, web-friendly versions.

This is a twist on the familiar 80/20 rule where the goal is to capture 80% of the value with only 20% of the functionality. For a number of reasons, I think this is an awesome thing and one that will only become more and more important.

the old (and new) lingua franca

One of the reasons Microsoft Office conquered the world is that it solved a very real business problem - communication.

Once upon a time, everyone used different software and it was a nightmare trying to share documents. I got a taste of this last year when someone asked me to help them "open" a Word Perfect document. As the standard office productivity program, MS Office allowed everyone (who purchased MS Office) to share files easily. This saved a ton of time and was a huge benefit to customers.

MS Office provided a lot of value but times are changing. Ironically, we are having another communications problem today even though everyone now uses MS Office.

The new communications problem is sharing. Our team is working on a project but it is hard to share the documents because some of us use laptops, one guy works from India, one person uses a Mac, etc. The problem now is not program format but connectivity.

Most people struggle through this problem by emailing documents via attachments, or moving things with a USB dongle, or using FTP through an IM client. A more advanced solution to this problem is team-software like Groove Office.

However the most interesting solution is what we see from Google - instead of transferring data between computers, put all the data and the program itself on the Internet and have everyone use it there. By putting all the data and the application in an Internet "cloud", the problem of using the same program and the problem of sharing the data both go away - no more fumbling with email attachments or USB sticks!

After Google purchased Writely and released their own version of web-calendar and web-spreadsheet, this web-application idea got a lot of attention. The critics immediately professed their undying love of their desktop PC and local hard drive. They whined that this web idea is DOA because you cannot work when the Internet is down (some also cried about missing features).

While this criticism is certainly true in the short-run it is short-sighted.

ubiquitous connectivity

At the same time programmers are moving apps to the web, other folks are pushing the boundaries of connectivity.

There are two forces at work here. One trend is increasing broadband. High-speed internet access (something I couldn't live without) is slowly but surely penetrating the US. The other trend is ubiquitous wireless.

Whatever the technology (wi-fi, Clearwire, or something else), it wont be long before you can go anywhere in a city and constantly be connected to the Internet. Whether it is your laptop or cell phone or some new wearable computing device, in a short time all of us will be online 24/7.

At that future point in time, being "offline" will be an oddity and all applications will focus on sharing data. Stand-alone applications will simply fade away as quaint anachronisms.

Closing

While this web-app idea is still "far out" to consumers, I am sure the visionaries at Google have been thinking about if for a long time. Desktop applications have the upper hand today but it wont be long before that situation reverses. Even without ubiquitous network access, we are already seeing new "killer apps" that are not even possible with the desktop model, such as YouTube, mySpace or even Google itself.

If you aren't not convinced yet by the supply-side argument, think about the demand-side, better known as consumers. Young people today are the consumers and business people of tomorrow and they are growing up in a connected world that is very different from the rest of us. Text messaging is the tip of the iceberg. The future will be dominated by people who are comfortable online and expect to be online. ("The Yellow Pages? That's a book?") For this group of people the advantages of a server-based application running in an Internet cloud are just too great to ignore.