Today, I’ve been playing around with the Citrix remote desktop service from Extrasys, a UK provider. You buy it on a subscription basis, depending on number of seats, software requirements and other service elements such as renting thin clients (very basic computers that basically act as an internet connection). In many respects, there isn’t a great deal to say or do, because you simply get a copy of Windows delivered over the net, which won’t seem very glamorous, new or exciting compared to the pretty creations from flickr, etc.

But from a small business perspective, these services make a lot of sense. The main benefits, as I see them, are:

Cost-savings — you only need thin clients in the office — they’re cheaper and consume less power — and license fees for software will be lower when bought through an ASP.
Total Cost of Ownership — there’s no additional support costs or depreciating hardware, and you don’t need an IT manager.
Speed and Versatility — you can work anywhere you have an internet connection; new workstations can be added instantaneously.
Security — your small business probably doesn’t have a RAID array, air filters or daily offsite backups; it doesn’t matter (from the IT perspective) if you lose your laptop or your office gets broken into — there’s nothing on the machines anyway.

What are the downsides? Not being able to work without an internet connection (trains and planes are starting to become so annoying in this respect!). There’s also an (illusory) sense of less security because your confidential documents are in someone else’s care, which is unnerving to many, though irrational.

Given that security will be an objection, Extrasys provide a two-step authentication. As well as the normal ID and password, you get a little plastic widget that provides a single-use passcode that’s tied to your User ID for every log-on. It looks like this:

One other caveat, the service wasn’t quite as fast as I’d like over my 2mb broadband connection. There was a noticeable delay as I typed, or when resizing windows. Not as fast as using Writely, for example. Not sure why this was. I’ll keep trying for a couple of days and amend this post if things speed up.

Given that this sort of solution was invented years ago, is it Web 2.0? I’d argue yes. A lot of what we’re seeing in Web 2.0 on the technical level was possible years ago, if only we’d had the connection speeds and the people to use them.

Q. In what ways are all the new tech startups — the so-called Web 2.0 companies — changing the competitive landscape for Google?

A. Web 2.0 is a marketing term, and it’s not a term that I use, but the underlying rationale technologically is correct, which is why it’s really happening. The basic argument is, if you think about it: it would be better for you to have all the data and all the applications that you use on a server somewhere, and then whatever computer or device you’re near you would be able to use. Let’s say you have a PC or a Mac at home and at the office, and you have a BlackBerry and a portable and so forth and so on. You’re constantly moving files around. What happens if you drop your ThinkPad and break it?

It’s just a better model to have the computation and the applications use what we call a cloud, somewhere in the Internet. I, among other people, have been talking about this for 15 years, well before Google was founded. It turned out to be really hard to pull off. But now finally these broadband networks are fast enough that you can actually do it. You just don’t need to always have everything on your local computer. So what I like about Web 2.0, as it’s called, is that it’s really the popularization of all this different technology. The other thing that’s interesting about Web 2.0, as it’s expressed, is that there’s another way of making money, which is the advertising model.

One spot of weirdness: I already have a gmail account, though it wasn’t the one I used to sign up for Writely. Hope there’s some way along the line to switch my documents over if the integration goes further — and I hope it does.

Dear ********

In a few days, we will be switching over to Google Accounts for Writely registration and sign-in.

To make things simple, we will create a new Google account for you at *********@********.com as part of the migration process.
You don’t have to do anything different — just sign in as usual, and your documents will be right there.

For more information about signing into Writely with your Google Account, see the FAQ at http://www.google.com/support/writely/bin/topic.py?topic=8615
Thanks!
Google Writely Team

alexa website statistics by alexaholic

Update: This graph doesn’t seem to work on Safari on an Mac, it seems. It shows there’s a lot more interest in bloglines than zoho, jot, 37Signals and even salesforce.com.

Now call me a narrow-minded sceptic if you will, but I’m not entirely convinced that we’re on the cusp of a computing revolution just yet.

P.S. Marc Fawzi from Evolving Trends is looking for a top-notch software developer to join his team in Silicon Valley. For some reason, he thought such people might come here.

Did you invent Web 2.0 or discover it?

Neither! It’s a name attempting to point people at something that existed. It wasn’t even me who came up with the expression. However, it’s an idea that I’ve been pursuing since 1997. I started talking about ‘infoware’, which is much the same thing, at the same conference [Linux Kongress, May 1997] that Eric Raymond started talking about The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Many applications and services that use the web as a platform (e.g. Writely) seem very different from those that use the alleged wisdom of crowds (e.g. digg). Hasn’t it been misleading to call them the same thing?

Web 2.0 is a catch-all term, for sure. But when I talk about the web as platform, we’re talking about using the network as a platform. And that does include the examples you point to, albeit with different emphases. This means a completely different approach to software development and to distributing that software. We’re still getting used to that and adjusting.

In the same way, the original PC applications were very much like mainframe applications. It took a long time before we arrived at the idea of shrink-wrapped software you can buy in a regular store. In the same way, we’re still getting used to the idea of what Web 2.0 means. The people who realise where the leverage points are will win. There’s a shift in power from software APIs to big databases. The people who own the databases will win. Those databases might be records of people, or it might be devices, behaviours or geographical information.

A lot of critics of Web 2.0 ventures point to flakey business models built on CPC advertising. Is this a fair characterisation?

Focusing on the failure of companies and ventures is always a big mistake. It stops people making real progress and draws attention away from what is successful. However, Web 2.0 is not about these bubble companies, it’s about the new approaches we are trying.

Most of the experimentation happening now is wrong. But by having those experiments it means we are learning what distinguishes the survivors. These new paradigms mean that there is a lower barrier to innovation. I think maybe the top ten of the Web 2.0 experiments that are big now will survive.

In any case, I think bubbles are a good thing. That’s how you get capital redeployed.

There’s a lot of controversy at the moment about paying the users of, or contributors to, Web 2.0 applications. What’s your take on that?

It’s what we ultimately have to figure out. The applications have to give the users a payback of some kind, whether that be in the experience or the outputs they get from them, If the applications aren’t working well in that way for users, then they’ll want to get paid in cash. There’s more than one answer.

To what extent do you think that Web 2.0 principles like communities, social networking, openness and software-as-a-service will become a permanent feature of the internet?

Communities and social networking have always been with us on the internet and they always will be. However, I think that other things will change. It will become harder and more closed. It’s like when the internet first started, everyone was equal, then barriers started to appear. Access to data will become more guarded in Web 2.0, I think, and so there’ll be fewer, more powerful players as time goes by. That’s not so true of the software, where I think openness is a lot more important to success.

How long do you think the term Web 2.0 will last before we start talking about something different?

I originally thought is was good for a couple of years. Now, I think it’s probably got another four to five years in it. There’s still a lot to talk about and learn.

Is that something different the semantic web?

Hmm. Before we had the web, there was going to be something called Open Systems Interconnect (OSI). It had been researched by all the top academics and was mandated by the government. It was a lot more comprehensive and clever. There wouldn’t have been things like 404 errors or out-of-date pages.

Then came along this crappy thing called the internet. And, as it turned out, though it was inferior to the OSI in many respects, it was good enough for most people, and as we know it’s never looked back. I think the academics think way too hard about these things. In a lot of ways, worse is better.

That’s not to say that I think the semantic web people have got it wrong. They have a lot of ideas that are right. However, I believe that Web 2.0 is already the semantic web. We are building meaning into the pages. Ultimately, people will solve the problems that need solving and ignore the little things that don’t bother anyone. Only the solutions that offer value to lots of people will be propagated.

As a publisher, doesn’t this boom in self-publishing make you uneasy?

Inasmuch as it does threaten what we do, so that has to change. People buy much fewer reference books than they used to, so we don’t publish as many. But we’re also interacting with this movement. We’re doing more to build interactivity into our books, even building Web 2.0 apps ourselves to extend the book experience onto the internet. Make magazine is closest to our new model. That was put together by people we found on the internet who had something new and different to share. We can help them do that. We’re also experimenting with using internet wikis as a way of putting together books.

The role of the publisher is in selecting and adding value to information, and the need for that won’t go away. Our business is changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. However, as with all this stuff, there’s going to be a period of upset and disruption before we discover the new rules.