Mass Web Hysteria


The World Wide Web has opened the awesome resource of the Internet to just about anybody with a computer and a modem. The Web is a great tool, and it offers fantastic value. Surprisingly, the most important change the Web has made is to demonstrate just how easy it can be to use software. Many former apologists find the Web so simple to use that they are demanding that all software be that easy. In particular, they like the way browsers don't make them go through the annoying installation process.

Software executives, particularly corporate IT vendors, are eagerly leaping onto this bandwagon. They, too, are swooning in love with browser-based software because they can field their products without inflicting a nasty installation process on the users. Before the Web, all software products required a complex installation process; products that run in a browser do not. This seems to be for most software executives a technological leap surpassing the invention of the zipper.

But it is just a sham! There is no reason that any non-Web program regardless of its technical details can't have a completely invisible installation process. If your computer required software installation, it would require it with or without the browser. The only reason why nonbrowser programs require installation is that this is the way programmers have always done things. Putting a bunch of questions in the install program made their programming job easier. Early browsers didn't have facilities for asking those questions, so programmers merely shrugged their shoulders and stopped asking them. If further proof were needed, programmers hardly even noticed the setback, while for many users it made the Web the easiest platform they had ever used.

Installation aside, browsers are weak as kittens. Their interaction idioms are prehistoric. Their technical structure is a primitive joke. They are as flexible as an icicle. Any program running inside a browser must necessarily sacrifice enormous power and capability. It infuriates me that software managers are eager to carve the heart out of their applications by porting them to the Web to get the advantage of no installation, when they could have the same installation-free product merely by saying to their developers, "Get rid of the installation process, please!"

Users are demanding browser-based software because they don't know any better. Software developers, however, are going along with it for all of the wrong reasons. The Web is organized like the old Soviet Union, with central computers dictating the actions of powerless desktop machines. Programmers particularly those in corporate IT departments own the central computers, so, like the Soviet commissars, they stand to benefit by this move. Instead of getting the no-installation benefit for free, users are paying a huge cost in loss of long-term control over their information infrastructure.



Inmates Are Running the Asylum, The. Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy &How to Restore the Sanity - 2004 publication
ISBN: B0036HJY9M
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 170

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