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Originally published on 06/06/2002
For years, George Colony of Forrester Research has been preaching the rise of the "X Internet," a.k.a. the executable Internet. George's point is that there will soon be a rise of applications that run over the Internet, and that URLs will soon launch programs, not just display Web pages.
Fast Facts:
Softricity
www.softricity.com |
| CEO |
Harry Ruda. Previously CEO of ITS.
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| HQ |
Boston, MA
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| Employees |
45
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| Market |
Application deployment
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| Funding |
$25M in two rounds. Most recent lead investors are Prism and Longworth. Closing C round now.
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| Profitable? |
Projected in 2004
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Economics has made this a gradual shift. Most of the first wave of application service providers went out of business. However, some are thriving, and as their businesses solidify, so too will technology. These services will end up looking less like Web sites and more like regular desktop applications. This is an opportunity being chased by companies like AppStream, which I covered in March, and Softricity, which recently won a three-year contract to "dot-netify" Microsoft's applications. Ultimately, says Softricity cofounder David Greschler, you'll be able to run ordinary applications over the Web without installing them on your system. This is a great thing. (Java offers similar advantages, but Microsoft is doing a good job outmaneuvering Sun on the consumer and corporate desktop.)
The X Internet will coexist with -- not replace -- the Web, which will always be a perfectly good bucket to hold a newspaper, a blog, or other content. Publishers don't build printing presses, and we shouldn't expect them to program "reader" applications either.
Between full-on applications and content, though, there is a strange middle ground, currently occupied by Macromedia's Flash. Flash is, as Macromedia chief software architect Kevin Lynch reminded me at the Nielsen Norman Group usability conference this week, by far the most widely installed PC desktop plug-in (Microsoft ships it with Internet Explorer -- another blow to Java).
Browsers, the X Internet, and Flash have unique strengths. The challenge is to get businesses to use each platform for its strengths, and not play to its weaknesses.
- Rafe Needleman
email: rafe-needleman@catchoday.com
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