Web-Based Applications

Here’s my presentation on open-source software and the wide world of web-based applications.  Thanks again to everyone at the Heritage Foundation for inviting me to participate in this event, with special thanks to Alex Adrianson, Bridgett Wagner, and Robert Bluey. Also, thanks to my co-panelists David All and Robert Willington.

My portion of the panel discussion starts around 22 minutes into the recording.

Software can be intuitive and blessedly easy or it can require expertise and training. Software can be free or can be sold at a price. If you were to categorize the entire world of software by these two dimensions—easy vs. hard and free vs. paid—you’d notice that all the software you’ve grown to hate is at the nexus of difficult and expensive.  That type of software is the dreaded fourth kind.

What are the four kinds of software according to this model?  Here’s how they shake out:

Free Services (1st kind) - This group includes Google Docs, Flickr, WordPress.com, Blogger, SquareSpace, and even things we take for granted like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google itself.  Free and easy-to-use services have massive communities, often numbering into the tens of millions of users.  Because these services rely usually rely on advertising revenue and therefore seek the largest user-base possible they drift toward open standards and free flow of data in order to attract increasingly large audiences.

Paid Services (2nd kind) - This group includes premium versions of the former group like Google Apps, WordPress VIP Hosting, SalesForce, BaseCamp, and HighRise.  These services often benefits from the large user base of their free counterparts.  Companies embracing a “Freemium” model leverage the rapid feedback and massive test-bed provided by their free service’s audience to quickly improve their paid offering.  Customers pay for these otherwise free services because the paid version offers more features, more storage, more contacts, more emails, more projects, or more of something else.  Open standards are embraced here as well as customers are reluctant to send their data down any “one-way streets.”

Free Open-Source Software (3rd kind) - This group includes CMS systems like WordPress’s self-hosted version, Drupal, Joomla as well as desktop software like HandBrake or Audacity.  These software titles are free, but the technical expertise required to use them means that users will still be investing a great deal of their time.  Users typically move down from the easy/free square to the hard/free square because they’re looking for more control and ability to customize their software.  Open standards rule here as well as customers are also the creators/coders of this software, removing the incentive to create lock-ins.  Most successful open-source communities begin with open standards, as it’s easier to attract users to system that don’t trap data—again, avoiding any “one-way streets.”

Paid, Proprietary Software (4th kind) – This group includes Microsoft Exchange email, Microsoft Access, or that proprietary CMS system your company uses that no one else seems to use.  Though some of these products are widely used—namely those that grew-up during the PC era—those that face well-organized open-source rivals often have comparatively smaller user-bases as barriers to entry are very high here.  Though these products are often marketed as highly powerful and customizable, their comparatively tiny user-bases and closed code limit their extendability.  These products tend not to favor open standards and are reluctant to make data transfers easy as data lock-in remains a cornerstone of their business model.

This analysis shows that free isn’t always better than paid and easy isn’t always better than difficult to use—trade-offs can be made to find better overall products.  However, when products are both difficult to use and expensive the same trade-off logic often ceases to apply.  These hard/paid applications limit their user bases and therefore suffer from a lack of feedback, outside contribution, and innovation.

This thinking is counter-intuitive to many who believe that expensive and complex things are always superior despite the reverse often being true.  For example, my father once owned a Rolls Royce, an expensive and very convoluted  automobile. One of its supposed luxury features was an hydraulic leveling system that kept the car perfectly level even if a heavy package (or person) occupied one of the seats.  The system shifted fluid around the leveling system providing more pressure to the weighed-down corner, keeping the car level.  Unfortunately, the same system that ran the leveler also provided hydraulic pressure to the brakes, meaning that when the leveler stopped working, the brakes often stopped working as well.  This is when a Honda begins to seem appealing.

Software applications can be a lot like the Rolls Royce, seemingly luxurious, but also incredibly convoluted and prone to system-wide failure.  Simple software is less prone to these sorts of drawbacks and is often better in terms of its user experience and overall effectiveness at doing its jobs, much like how Honda’s are actually much more pleasant to drive than a Rolls Royce—think “school bus.”

So, avoid the dreaded fourth kind and keep your software straight-forward, open, and effective.

photo credit: Matt McGee

Google announced a few great updates to Google Apps suite this week, which means those of us using Google Apps (like ReadyMadeWeb) are getting free upgrades at no additional cost (we pay nothing to use Google Apps) and without any additional setup—this is the beauty of web-based software.

So what are the new changes?  These aren’t major fixes, but among the updates are two very small issues that had been an annoyance in Google Apps.

First, Google addressed the paranoia of many users who haven’t liked the conspicuous lack of a save button on many documents.  The auto-save function built into Google Docs is supposed to free us from worrying about hitting the save button every few minutes, a worry forged through years of using buggy and crash-prone software like many of the early versions of Microsoft Word or MS Works.  So, just to be nice and prove that they’re listening to our paranoid need for a button, the folks at Google have added one.  Now users can click the button manually between Google’s frequent auto-saves, to satisfy their compulsion.

Google also added a core functionality that really needed to be part of Apps from day one—a clipboard.  This clipboard will allow copy/paste functionality to work entirely within Google Docs, rather than using your computer’s built-in copy/paste functionality.  This might seem redundant until you consider the problem of preserving format consistency when using a Mac or PC’s built-in clipboard.  Copying document data from a web-based application, to a desktop clipboard, and back into a web-based app can cause some serious formatting shenanigans.  Columns don’t stay aligned, highlights and fonts aren’t preserved, and the code behind the data becomes a garbled mess.  The new built-in clipboard solves these issues by keeping everything within Docs.

Despite these seemingly basic features having just come online, Google reports that even more companies and universities are flocking to its online offering:

With 3,500 employees, Lincoln Property Company is one of the largest property management firms in the United States. Recently, Lincoln Property made the decision to switch to Google Apps from their complex and costly Novell Groupwise email infrastructure. Not only will they save an estimated $200,000 per year, they’ll finally be able to equip every single employee with email, instant messaging and calendars — not just the 950 desk-based workers who previously had email access.

The Google Apps train keeps rolling in the education space as well. Seven million students around the world are now using Google Apps at school! DePauw University, Yale University, Davenport University and the College of William and Mary are just a handful of the most recent schools to switch to Google Apps.

Large corporations and Universities can afford the best that money can buy, yet they’re realizing that buying boxes of software that must be installed on thousands of machines and then updated and re-updated no longer makes sense, especially when web-based alternatives like Google Docs are also more secure and allow users to access their documents anywhere on any computer with a Internet connection.

To read more about the most recent updates to Google Apps, check out the entry on the official Google Blog.

Google has already announced its intent to stop supporting Internet Explorer, so the email I received today from the Google Apps support team was entirely unexpected, but it did contain some interested bits of information that I did find surprising.  It also illustrates why the ReadyMadeWeb IT mantra, “Software should be handled by software experts,” is so spot-on.

The phasing out of Internet Explorer 6 is coming very fast—the email announced that Google Apps and Google Site Editor will stop supporting IE6 on March 1st.  This makes the window between announcement and phase-out barely over a month long. But it’s no wonder that Google is slamming the door shut on Internet Explorer 6 as it played a key role in the recent Chinese-sponsored attack on Google.  Yet despite its security and stability issues, IE6 still has a 20% market share.  Many pundits are blaming this on corporate and institutional IT departments that are holding on to IE6 because an upgrade to IE7 or IE8 would break another piece of software that relies on some bit of antiquated code in the troublesome IE6.

But perhaps IT departments aren’t the culprit here.  Instead, I’d place the blame with what I call “Old School Software.”  Old School Software demands hiring a staff to maintain servers filled with software they didn’t write, updating client-side applications on potentially thousands of employee PCs, and leaving updating and patching to third parties.  Those third parties often have little incentive to keep applications in tip top shape due to the incredible cost of switching platforms.  Small bugs in a program aren’t sufficient motivation for a company to drop their database vendor and move on to something better because of the incredible cost of buying countless server and client-side software licenses.  High costs therefore create software products that lurch between roughly finished versions, instead of steadily improving with each passing week or even day. That’s why IE6 is around, because the market for software has been so deeply flawed.

But now that even dirt cheap Internet connections have created a market for web-based suites like Google Apps, Zoho, and SalesForce, the old way of doing things seems absurd. With web-based or “cloud” apps your IT staff can be much smaller because they don’t have to maintain servers filled with specialized software.  Instead, they  can focus on keeping web browsers up-to-date (rather than clinging to outdated browsers) and providing solid Internet connectivity. Updates to the applications themselves are left in the hands of the web-based apps provider, who knows that competition is just a few clicks away.

Okay, so switching applications company-wide is never easy, but web-based app providers know that they’re not dealing with 5-year product replacement cycles and investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Instead, the cost of switching between web-based apps comes down to a registration form and a few days of training. These are small steps for a customer to take in order to abandon lackluster software for a superior product.  That’s why—again, according to the email I received—in 2009 alone “the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.”  The email also said that the team’s goal for 2010 is to beat this already high number of feature improvements and additions.

If you’re thinking about web-based applications for your business or non-profit, consider these competing models.  The Old School’s high prices cost your organization more than money, they also make the barriers to change incredibly high, holding you back from taking advantage of the latest and greatest—or in some cases, force you to continue using outdated and insecure software like IE6.  The web-based approach moves you into a new market of fierce competition created by low-prices that encourages software developers to improve upon their product as quickly as possible.

If you have any questions about about Google Apps, Zoho, SalesForce, or any other web-based software, please email ReadyMadeWeb at info@readymadeweb.com.

Okay, so abandoning IE isn’t really a new thing, but now, people are leaving IE because their governments are issuing official proclamations recommending they do so. Both Germany and France have issued statements recommending that their citizens cease using Internet Explorer until Microsoft releases a patch to fix a security hole that allows clever hackers to take total control of a machine.

Security Experts at McAfee Labs have joined in the chorus, releasing a statement outlining IE’s role in the recent Chinese-sponsored attack on Google and several other US and European companies, noting that:

Internet Explorer is vulnerable on all of Microsoft’s most recent operating system releases, including Windows 7. Still, so far the attacks we’ve seen using this vector have been focused on Internet Explorer 6. Microsoft has been working with us on this matter and we thank them for their collaboration.

Microsoft’s statement on the issue confirms this, but also points out that versions 7 and 8 are also vulnerable:

Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 on Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, and Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 on supported editions of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2 are vulnerable.

Even when this security problem is patched, IE will still have problems inherent to its architecture, like the ActiveX system that ships with every version of IE.  The Mozilla knowledge base has this to say about ActiveX:

Because this system is capable of automatically downloading new ActiveX controls without your involvement, it has been exploited by spyware, viruses, and other malicious software. Internet Explorer has improved ActiveX security in a number of ways, and many of the security loopholes have been closed in IE 7. However, it is still relatively easy to download and activate a malicious ActiveX control on your computer.

So, while IE7 and especially IE8 may be better browsers than the much-maligned IE6, Internet Explorer is likely to continue its run as the least secure browser on the market.

If you’re still regularly using Internet Explorer, you should take this time to look at other browser options, such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or even Opera.

Update: Microsoft has patched this security hole.  I maintain that using Internet Explorer is hazardous to your computing health.