Easyjet has recently updated its booking site to use a newer, slicker AJAX/Web 2.0 GUI

Unfortunately the new booking process seems to be more hassle and slower than the old one. More than once when I used it recently I had to hit reload to get a page to display or to get the next page to show up.

I’m not singling out Easyjet for criticism here, I’ve seen similar “improvements” on other sites, both eCommerce and general interest. Part of the problem is that web 2.0 seems to load web servers differently (not necessarily more but placing the load in different places) and so when a site moves to the new interface various services are hit harder than they used to be and get overloaded. In particular web 2.0 sites seem to make more, but smaller, database transactions and I suspect that this is the heart of the problem as the existing database will be tuned to larger but fewer transactions.

To add to this it is entirely possible that Web 2.0 sites get hit by a perception in slowness that is in fact due to their attempts to provide a faster service. Because a Web 2.0 page will load (as far as the browser is concerned) quicker the delay as the bits of the middle of the page are loaded on top becomes noticeable. When there was just one loading thing at the top even if it was as slow or slower we put it down to network issues as opposed to something on the page, thus we were more tolerant of the slowness.

Of course sometimes it is the lack of horsepower in the client that causes the slowdown. By moving more of the processing to the client, web 2.0 sites suffer when clients lack the speed and resources needed to display the page. Some sites with masses of Web 2.0 content such as facebook and gmail have come up with special “lite” versions which load faster and do not place such a burden on the client browser. We may well see more of this as time goes on.

The Google IO conference is providing a host of interesting announcements. One that is currently getting a good deal of coverage is “Google Wave“. Of course we have to see what actually shows up but what it looks like is a bunch of snazzy Web2.0 AJAXy (with added HTML 5!!!) frontends and tools to a wiki. This is not necessarily a bad thing - wikis tend to be somewhat idiosyncratic and also very poor at handling anything other than raw text - but a jazzed up Wiki doesn’t sound quite as revolutionary as perhaps Google would like us to think Wave is.

On the other hand the announcement of SaaS/cloud interoperability between Google and Salesforce.com, which doesn’t sound particularly novel, may in fact be truly revolutionary for the users. By combining the clouds it becomes possible to write applications that use numerous Google tools and utilities (including I suppose Google Wave) and access the business data in Salesforce.com. This sort of integration may end up having a signficant effect on the business world at large because it permits even very small companies to have the seamless IT backend that hitherto have required large MIS organizations and have therefore only been possible for large enterprises. Indeed many large organizations have problems integrating customer facing sales and support data/applications with internal ones so it is possible that this integration may actually tip the balance in favor of smaller nimbler companies.

The one downside I can see with this integration is that it potentially leads to worse security breaches because a poorly written google API app could now expose all the salesforce.com data to an infiltrator. This, on the other hand, is something that the Wave team seem to have thought about since Wave will, we are told, not be tied to Google’s servers and can in fact be installed inside the company firewall.

Much of the world has been twittering and blogging over the weekend about how Amazon appears to have been removing certain works from its sales rank algorithms. The works are removed because they are (allegedly) “adult” but in fact the real issue common feature is that these books seem to be about homosexuality rather than other “adult” issues.

There is, of course, much outrage - particularly because Amazon’s “glitch” excuse simply fails to meet the usual definition of a glitch. This problem seems to have started in February if not last year and to have gradually ramped up over the last couple of days. All in all this doesn’t sound like a “glitch” so much as a major software failure that has been exploited by humans.

I’m not alone in this basic viewpont, it seems to be shared by Information Week’s Mitch Wagner amongst others. Indeed there are some livejournal posts that indicate that the explot is the work of either a single hacker or a small group.

However the issue is not so much whether it is a hack or a concerted group so muchas to shine a light onto a what may be an architectural weakness of Amazon’s site. Amazon basically relies on site visitors to provide tags and to flag things as objectionable. It seems likely that for the most part these flags and tags pass through the Amazon system with no human supervision. This is probably partly because there are simply too many for a single human to verify and partly because for legal liabilty reasons Amazon found it better to not have someone make a corporate decision on the matter of “objectionable material”.

If the problem is indeed that people are gaming the system then fixing it while retaining the benefits of the “wisdom of crowds” approach that helps Amazon scale so well is going to be hard to fix - indeed it may be impossible. I’m sure that Amazon programmers are busy rolling back the auto-objectionable code and that someone is about to permit “objectionable” material back into the Amazon ranking systems but that is a short term fix and doesn’t solve the problem that Amazon faces regarding people not wishing to see “objectionable” content.

This problem is partly caused by the fact that different people have very different ideas about what is “objectionable” so no large group of people will ever agree. However it is exacerbated by the fact that Amazon attempts to present a single storeface to all. The situation then gets huge visibility because Amazon is such a major reseller that books often depend on Amazon ranking and Amazon visibility for success. Thus removing certain works from the ranking scheme is bound to get those associated with the works in question very worked up because they can see their revenue disappearing into a rankless desert.

Recently it was revealed that Cisco was moving into the server space with virtualized offerings to compete with IBM, HP etc. It should come as no surprise that Juniper, its major networking rival, might be looking at something similar. Nor should it be surprising that IBM might like to find a networking partner to help it fight Cisco. Hence this TechCrunch article and this PCWorld story about IBM and Juniper working together in this field are more interesting for their vagueness than their existence.

IBM has more cloud and virtualization experience than any other company simply because many of the concepts used today were pioneered on IBM mainframes decades ago and its blue chip status and general air of reliability means that the trust issues about cloud computing are reduced. Hence IBM’s success in getting customers to sign up to its cloud computing initiatives.

The PC World article mentions IBM using Juniper APIs for network traffic engineering which doesn’t seem like a very strong tie. One suspects that IBM will be suggesting that henceforth its sales partners look at using Juniper rather than Cisco when asked to provide networking gear for the cloud.

The problem with Web 2.0 and “cloud computing” has always been that sometimes you just don’t have internet connectivity. Hitherto most previous attempts at server-centric computing have failed. Enough critical users are on the road enough of the time that server only solutions have failed - remember Oracle’s doomed efforts or a decade ago? The same potential problem has hit web 2.0 applications as well. Salesforce.com has a dedicated offline mode and synchronization method for example and many other web 2.0 applications simply don’t work offline. This obviously limits their use in an increasingly mobile world.

However now the price of serious amounts of memory and storage (flash drives at a few Euros/dollars/swiss francs/pounds per gigabyte and gigabytes of DRAM similarly priced) means that we ought to be able to cache “most recently used” stuff locally and rely on the cloud as a repository of the rest. Until recently all this was irrelevant because the only platform we could use was the laptop with its large hard disk, Windows OS, Microsoft Office suite and comparatively limited battery life. Given the full service Windows OS and Office suite there really wasn’t much incentive in Web 2.0 / cloud versions of basic office productivity software.

Now, however, we have the netbook. Netbooks are frequently linux based and hence don’t have Microsoft Outlook/ Word etc. They also have less memory/storage compared to today’s laptops (perhaps about the same as was common 3-5 years ago) and most important of all they cost a LOT less. They also weigh a lot less and are thus ideal for business trips. Their real drawback though is that they are underpowered and so when back in the office the user wants his real computer - and thus faces the “Sync” challenge.

This combination means that ideal solution is some kind of cloud computing with offline storage. And Google is now able to offer this for Gmail accounts. Not only that but it offers “flaky” mode support for travellers with intermittent internet access. As someone who was recently in that situation I can say that this looks like a real winner.

It may also be the bullet that kills Microsoft. But that is the subject of a separate post

Google annouced a new (beta) API yesterday, Google Gears. Gears is a logical extension of Google’s AJAX initiatives in that it allows developers to create AJAX applications that can run locally on the browser in offline mode as well as when the user is online.

Both the Register and ZDnet have reports on the release but while ZDnet goes more into the details of what it consists of, it fails to point out the party most likely to be upset with this move - Microsoft. The Register, on the other hand, is less shy:

The search engine behemoth marked out clear intentions to enter territory dominated by Microsoft by offering free, open source technology that works without an internet connection.

[...]Google already offers its own web-based docs and spreadsheets product to its users and said it plans to introduce programs including email, calendars, and word processing to its millions of users via the off-line browser extension software.

At this point the threat that Netscape posed to Microsoft all those years ago, that the browser becomes the OS, looks like it might be finally realized. And Google, unlike Netscape, has a lot of money, which means that Microsoft will struggle to put it out of business. Indeed Google is busy making noises that it wants gears (or something similar) accepted as a standard and implemented in all browsers, thereby ensuring that Microsoft will find it hard to make some of its favourite tricks work - such as changing standards and formats.

Of course if those Microsoft/Yahoo rumors were serious then this could be the moment that Microsoft bites the bullet and overpays for Yahoo. Whether Yahoo plus MSN plus… can manage to tempt surfers away from their Google habit is unclear, but so long as people continue to use Google as a search engine, and hence as long as advertisers find Google a good way to get coverage, Google will continue to have piles of money to throw at projects like this which benefit the internet users but discomfort Microsoft.

One final thought: because Google comes from a webcentric view, one suspects that Google’s solutions will implement collaboration features well. This could be the key to people quitting the profitable Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft have put collaboration in Office but I don’t think many people use it because it doesn’t work the way they want it to. Google’s tools probably will…

The WSJ has an article (subscription required) about how attitudes of network equipment purchasers seem to be returning to those of the boom years of the late 1990s.

Just as they did 10 years ago, it seems that the large enterprises are willing to take the risk of buying from a start-up because they perceive the start-up to offer a better product at a cheaper price. And as always the big guys have the “niche” market excuse:

A spokeswoman for Cisco, San Jose, Calif., said many of the networking start-ups offer equipment in niche categories, making some of their customer wins negligible when compared to the global reach of Cisco.

Mind you, the next sentence ‘”This industry has experienced many waves of competition in the past and Cisco has thrived through each,” said Elizabeth McNichols, a Cisco spokeswoman’ is also correct: Cisco is indeed a formidable competitor. However, the problem for Cisco (and other giants) is that what may look like a niche today may be mainstream tomorrow; after all, to the giants of the early 1990s, Cisco’s routers were a niche product compared with the SONET and SDH gear they were selling.

To my mind the big problem with the 2001 tech bust was that we threw out the good with the bad: Hopefully, this time around we’ll manage to avoid boom and bust and learn to only buy stuff that actually works and solves problems.

One clear difference this time around is that people are looking at the financial risks and benefits. As the article says, potential customers now vet the finances of their start-up vendors and they tend to buy stuff that allows them to keep a lean IT staff.

BusinessWeek has an article wondering whether its bubble time again in Silicon Valley and whether we should worry. This bubble is supposedly all about the producers of Web 2.0 products and is I think therefore almost by definition far less of a concern than the more general bubble of late 1990s.

When Caterina Fake, co-founder of the Flickr photo-sharing Web site, sat down in March to write a blog entry, she expected to rankle some readers. Her post, titled “It’s a bad time to start a company,” was a frank argument that a bubble was reinflating Internet businesses. Valuations are rising, hordes of copycat companies are getting funded, and venture capitalists are flooding hot areas with money again. Fake, who bootstrapped her company on $250,000 after the dot-com bust and sold it last year to Yahoo! Inc., wrote that those trends are making it impossible for upstarts to stand out. She dissed the notion that a second wave of Net development, dubbed Web 2.0, will benefit all the new ventures, many of which she called “features,” not companies. The frothiness, she added, reminded her of 1998.

I do agree with much of the opening statement. There is a lot of money floating around; there are a lot of people willing to either take risks or fund others; and I am certain that many of the “Web 2.0″ companies will fail because they don’t really have a product. However I disagree with the idea that this is anything out of the ordinary. It seems to me that we are looking at a return to the more usual Silicon Valley cycles, with one area hyped while others apparently languish, rather than the simultaneous frothing everywhere of 1999.

So do I think that Web 2.0 is excessively hyped? Possibly. But that doesn’t mean we should stop looking at new ideas in this space. Most of what Web 2.0 and other related fields such as blogging, rss and internet multimedia are doing today is living up to the claims and hopes of 1999. Between RSS and AJAX, for example, we appear to have solved the problem that Pointcast and other “push technology” startups were trying to fix.

Furthermore, as the BW article itself points out, one key difference between now and 1999 is that today companies can be started for far less and hence exits are consequently easier. If you have a company founded on $250,000, selling it for $5 million gives you a 20x return. Whereas a company founded on $5 million needs to be sold for $100 million for the same return. There are still plenty of hardware companies raising $5 million and more in financing but there aren’t that many Web 2.0 companies doing so. As a result I feel that the bubble is far less dangerous.