See? I Told You So

Ted / 18.Dec.2007

I have another piece of evidence to support my theory that nobody gives a shit about Web 2.0 outside of the 619,000 readers of TechCrunch. The 'crunch itself reports on a new study which finds that 94% of Americans have never tried an online productivity suite.

Pure Virtual Method Called :-{

Ok, so this gets better. The study also reports that 0.5% of the respondents have completely abandoned desktop software in place of web-based alternatives. If you consider that to be an adequate sampling, then about 1.5 million people have made the switch. This is about the population of San Jose and San Francisco combined. Coincidence?

If You Listen Carefully, You Can Actually Hear How Shitty XML-RPC Is

Now, to be fair, TechCrunch's Duncan Riley questions the statistical significance of this test. I, on the other hand, question Duncan Riley's ability to compute a confidence interval. If you say "Student t-Distribution" fast enough, it sounds a lot like "shut the fuck up".

Anyhow, that's tangential. The real question is, is this statistic evidence of the "online office suite" being a stupid idea, or 94% of Americans being an "opportunity"? Because you're reading it here, you can probably guess my opinion on the matter. When I worked at the country's 5th largest multinational corporation, I used an online office suite almost exclusively. Have you ever tried to scroll through some rows in an online spreadsheet using Firefox/Linux? Suicide starts looking attractive about 15 seconds into it.

Fortunately, large multinational corporation X also gave me a laptop with Windows & Excel on it, so I could do some real work.

Keep telling yourself it's an opportunity. Keep waiting for browser software to "catch up" to all of the shitty Ajax apps you're writing. While you are waiting for it, IT managers are still not relinquishing control of the desktop. While you are waiting for it, users are still saying "I'll just send you the Excel file". While you are waiting for it, 94% of the country is getting shit done.

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25 Comments

in before persai

anonymous / 18.Dec.2007 at 12:20pm

Ted you worked at GM? No way, so did my 3rd cousin Fred Jimstonewarder. Did you know him?

nhkc / 18.Dec.2007 at 12:47pm

"If you say 'Student t-Distribution' fast enough, it sounds a lot like 'shut the fuck up." That is absolutely hilarious. Way to go, Ted.

will / 18.Dec.2007 at 12:57pm

X doesn't look that web-2.0 friendly:
http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=X

not-x / 18.Dec.2007 at 01:12pm

[Re: not-x] Of course X isn't that Web 2.0–friendly. They make an actual product and a business model that doesn't involve giving it away for free with ads. ("This bridge brought to you by eHarmony!")

paul fisher / 18.Dec.2007 at 01:58pm

I'd be amazed if 0.5% of Americans could tell you what an online app is.

tricky dick / 18.Dec.2007 at 02:04pm

My Man, Props! My last gig, I wanted to use basecamp to keep the team up to date, and that wasn't too painful. We even uploaded the MS office files to its FTP storage. Ah, but wait there's more: At the end of every project, drones like me have to walk the security auditor through the archives and delete copy, etc. Big problems! BIG - they were indexing our archive, allowing a crawl of the data.

alan wilensky / 18.Dec.2007 at 02:20pm

See, I want to kill myself about 15 seconds into trying to scroll through some rows in Excel 2007... or waiting 30 seconds for Word 2007 to actually display data while it decides my printers are unreachable... or... I think the fail's already leaked back into the desktop software world. It's too late, just nuke the site from orbit.

gr / 18.Dec.2007 at 02:50pm

Online Apps doesn't afraid of anything, apparently.

nin-mofo / 18.Dec.2007 at 03:12pm

"this is web 2.0" the skype crackered "you must fight the desktop!" So Zoho gotted his presentation tool and blew up the dual core "HE GOING TO KILL US" said the desktop "i will calculate him" said the excel and he fired the 65000 rows. Zoho failed at him and tried to blew him up. But then the firefox crashed and they were trapped and not able to kill "No! I must have the ajax" he shouted The skype said "No, Zoho. You are the fail" And then Zoho was on uncov

please kill me now / 18.Dec.2007 at 04:15pm

I think you vastly overestimate the majority of our citizens.

tom / 18.Dec.2007 at 04:38pm

"If you say "Student t-Distribution" fast enough, it sounds a lot like "shut the fuck up" Cool if I go ahead and appropriate that Ted? That's fucking watershed material.....

dotcomcowboy / 18.Dec.2007 at 04:50pm

>>>This is about the population of San Jose and San Francisco combined. Coincidence? -- hmmm... can we Google Map that with zip codes and addresses of Web 2.0 startups?

mike cane / 18.Dec.2007 at 05:16pm

Desktop apps will never die, no matter how much AJAX you throw at it. Guess what javascript runs on, *gasp* a desktop app!

zero / 18.Dec.2007 at 05:25pm

Ted, it seems that someone can't read what they write (or maybe drinks too much Mountain View koolaid. Anyway, href="http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/12/the_office_ques.php">Nick Carr here explains that, actually if you read the chart right, the number is only at 73% which, if you ask me, it's friggin' high ! But ZoHo is lame, and so are GApps, I'm with you on that one

gianni / 18.Dec.2007 at 05:48pm

"If you consider that to be an adequate sampling, then about 1.5 million people have made the switch. This is about the population of San Jose and San Francisco combined. Coincidence?" Only if every American has a computer and uses it for something other than Bejeweled and porn. I'd put the real # around 300,000.... tops.

techmerkin / 18.Dec.2007 at 05:50pm

even better, TechCrunch article has now been amended to reflect the correct figure, go check it out http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/18/majority-of-americans-on-google-docs-what-you-talkin-bout-willis/

gianni / 18.Dec.2007 at 05:51pm

this webapp to get funny articles is much slower than my desktop version. what a POS.

asshat / 18.Dec.2007 at 06:42pm

there is no future in the internet.

hopeless / 18.Dec.2007 at 08:03pm

This is completely inane to both hype it up (as other guys have done) or completely dismiss it (as you do). In 1999, e-commerce was going to take over retail. You may be too young to remember the phrase "Amazoned". Guess what - both Amazon and Wal-mart are doing fine now (subject to general economic conditions impacting both). Web productivity apps aren't going to take over the world. But they are going to carve out a market - Google Apps will do fine, and even your not-so-favorite Zoho or 37Signals will find a market, if they keep their head down and execute. Go read some tech industry history. Micro-computers were born in mid-70's (Micro-soft was how they spelled the name in 76), and it was not until mid 80's that PCs really found their footing. Many small vendors thrived in that time. Some of them are still around now.

thisisstupid / 18.Dec.2007 at 10:50pm

Everything changes but it really stays all the same.. Did you know there were spread sheets before computers? Yes it's true! They incedentaly had page up and page down functionality and also sucked. However the only investment was some paper a pencil and an eraser. Oh and someone who knew how to do math... Which in 1930 wasn't all that hard to find. I'm pretty sure I recall useing very very large spreadsheets LONG before office productivity suites were web based, or even on Windows.... We're talking 80x20 characters baby (controls menu took up space) It was slow then too. Try telling it to seek to 22,4000 and it'd take a while, you'd sit there for a good second or so while you waited for the hard drive to seek and poof there it was. It was a lot like modern web based tools and gui tools when they first came out. That said I wouldn't go back to it, but I'm not stupid I wouldn't go to a web based one yet... I remember people saying the same thing when Lotus 123 first came for Windows...

noah / 19.Dec.2007 at 09:44am

THere is absolutely, completely, 100% guaranteed no way 27% of Americans heard about Google Docs.

charles d / 19.Dec.2007 at 12:18pm

Not only does DOM/JS/HTML browser junk scale so damn poor but workarounds are becoming alike the braindead COBOL programming.. Down with Web 2.0.. and all idiot AJAX overhead. Yes you can make toys but even those toys start to suck as it gets soo damn slow and frustrating. I heard the 'they'll do fine' with VHS too.. Silicon idiots are losing the plot rapidly in yet another creation. Hellooo, machines went 20x faster and I am supposed to feel ok working with a 386 16Mhz Ajax app on a quad-core? It will get real ugly, and I cannot wait for mid next year to see it all get 'Am0-zoned' with volatility..

ln / 21.Dec.2007 at 04:27pm

Well you dragged me along there for a while, but ended up fingering your own fallacy: Quote: "I'll just send you the Excel file". While you are waiting for it, 94% of the country is getting shit done. :Endquote You accept the notion that most of what gets done with spreadsheets is productive work? Did you leave that big company you worked for voluntarily? If the saying hasn't been coined I'll do it: "Create software that can be used by any idiot, and every idiot will try and use it." The big company I worked for allowed a clueless user to assign everyone a mandatory password generated from an Excel spreadsheet. That lasted until I marched into his managers office and 'splained the problem with that approach. Spreadsheets are great for keeping track of things like your record collection or small office accounting duties. I even know a guy who composes all his letters in Excel and refuses to use Word (nobody knows why). But the hundreds of stories we got in the last few years of lost SSN data from stolen or lost laptops, and even misplaced servers should be screaming bloody murder to people capable of understanding that some data needs to be handled by REAL applications that DON'T reside on end user (even those who consider themselves sophisticated) machines. For those things that don't fall into that category of "REALLY IMPORTANT" an online spreadsheet will do just fine in most cases. So, got that?: Important stuff: Do on a server for security reasons. Not so important stuff: Do it wherever you like. How many copies of the $400 software you want to spring for?

macbeach / 24.Dec.2007 at 05:16pm

I'll take 12 copies.

tricky dick / 24.Dec.2007 at 07:28pm

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See? I Told You So

Pure Virtual Method Called :-{

If You Listen Carefully, You Can Actually Hear How Shitty XML-RPC Is

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