Phil Wainewright slams the idea that Office style services will go wholly online as naive.
The extent to which people are talking up this fantasy market for hosted personal productivity suites beggars belief.
Microsoft will be relieved. At one time I’d have agreed with Phil without a second thought. Today, I’m not so sure. A year ago I wouldn’t have thought I’d come off Outlook, then Thunderbird but I did. Today, I’m a Gmail junkie. Does that make me a sad techie person? Not at all. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with technology and only get excited about it when it does something I find useful. Gmail fulfills that requirement.
Phil’s argument centres around two premises:
- Desktop applications are inherently richer than SaaS
- 99.9999% high speed access is a pipedream and that network flakiness acts as a brake to productivity.
A sizeable number of Phil’s commenters agree with him.
I agree there are some features in Office style apps I’d like to see in services like Writely and Zoho. But to simply write those services off on that basis is equally naive. How long did it take Microsoft to get Word into useful form? Compare that to Writely. We’re talking months compared to years. Salesforce.com has shown just how fast you can ramp up numbers of users and proliferate applications through it’s AppExchange platform. According to Dan Farber, some 60 applications added in the last quarter alone. EditGrid is an extraordinarily useful online spreadsheet that I could not have conceived even 3 years ago.
Phil asks:
Who in the world can guarantee that they will never have to work offline?
That’s a rhetorical question with enough by way of emphasis to ensure it is impossible to answer on any logical basis. No-one can guarantee they will never have to work offline. But users can choose whether the collaborative benefits of SaaS outweigh current functional or technical limitations. In my experience, it’s a no contest. SaaS wins every time. That’s not to say I don’t welcome the ability to use some offline services. The editor I’m using for this post allows for offline staging. Great when I’m thinking something through. But for most other things, it doesn’t matter. To me.
When Phil adds that:
the fact remains that personal creative tasks, such as composing text, editing a spreadsheet or creating content for a slide presentation are performed by individual effort. Collaboration is something you do when you break off to seek advice, information or inspiration, or when it’s time to review progress. When you’re mid-task, collaboration interrupts and even inhibits the flow.
he’s ignoring reality. Does the phone not ring in Phil’s world? Do email alerts not impinge? Don’t people wander up and ask questions? Or the dog nuzzle up looking for attention? Or children race in demanding help?
High speed connections can be spotty and do behave erratically at times. Which is not much good when you’re using multi-media applications. And it can be pretty frustrating if you’re manipulating a spreadsheet. The flaw in Phil’s argument rests in the assumption the status quo will not markedly improve. (You can also imply the development of high speed networks will lag developer ingenuity.)
That is to deny history. I’m sufficiently long in the tooth to remember when 4MB RAM was considered state of the art. The same when I spent £2,200 on an EIZO 17 inch monitor and the graphics card to power it.
Here in laggardly Spain, where telecoms innovation has been left to the start-ups, I’m seeing grid systems reaching people who previously had no telecommunications. Setup cost is minimal and to date, service performance and cost compares well with Telefonica’s copper based DSL service.
Phil may have a point today and on for the next couple of years. Never is way too strong.
Technorati Tags: SaaS
