major case of i-told-you-so

You win this round Kats...
But I shall win the war :)

This is too much fun. I hope we're not getting too serious about it. You're my friendly arch-nemesis :)

You know.. if you lose all the battles, I think you lose the war by default, too. :)

Psh... Don't bank on winning anymore :)

All set for DB?

Kats... I totally forgot you moved your blog away from Livejournal. Now I have like a year of posts to catch up on.

Where to start:
1) Congratulations on Waterloo Black, this gave me a tingly "Wow! Kats!" sensation.

2) I am wholly unsurprised about the Google thing. Didn't I have a conversation with you where I said "so you're working for Google next winter?". You were probably being a Mathsoc Movie usher while I stunk of cold-sweat, trains, and corn-nuts... so it might have been a hallucination.

3) While I really do think that we're finally (really) approaching the time of the thin-client, when will we stop trying to build things on top of antiquated web-browser technology? Yes, Ajax is cool. But it's also a collection of beautiful hacks, and we can do a lot better.

4) It seems like Google is powered entirely by sunshine and goodwill these days. What happens when Microsoft and Yahoo muscle in on their targeted advertising market, driving down prices. What happens if increasingly sophisticated fraudulent click-attacks threaten the integrity of their advertising/payment model? Will investors have the patience to wait for the next profit-machine to come down the pipeline? I really hope they do, but it makes me nervous. Maybe I'm just a little gun-shy from the bubble burst.

But I have an RSS feed! Anyway..

1) Thanks

2) Yeah, I seem to recall that too. Unless it was a shared hallucination, I think it did happen.

3) True. However, Ajax is just the (current) interface that Google uses to interact with their back-end web services. Unless I'm mistaken, most of their web services don't actually need Ajax; another thin-client-like user interface would work just as well. So eventually I suspect they will move away from Ajax.

4) Don't underestimate the power of sunshine and goodwill :). And yes, the advertising model won't last forever. Which is why I think Google Base (or whatever it eventually morphs into) will be their new ticket to continuing their influx of revenue.

3) I actually wasn't talking about Google specifically. My question is more like "when are we going to get a new flexible thin-client UI? and who is going to give it to us?" This was my hypothetical idea for a 4th year design project 2 years ago actually. If I were to guess, I would say 2008 and Google. I'm imagining a new paradigm, something that's more than a Google Browser but less than a Google OS. Something that could turn the OS into a commodity, much like Java was naively championed to do 10 years ago.

Of course, Microsoft (and Apple) will be taking the rich-client to crazy new places (seriously! ow, my NDA! it burns!), while leveraging Ray Ozzie's magic fantabulous cloud of web services to make things more dynamic than in the past.

4) We'll see. It still feels like a bit of a house of cards for now, but if it can hold out long enough...

I'm still waiting for http://calendar.google.com