Matt’s experience at South by Southwest suggests that a lot of the big social networking companies actually don’t have (or won’t share) a whole lot of insight into what their users are doing on line, or how it’s changed their lives. But is this because their systems are too simple (they just host/carry what other folks are doing) or too complex (too much information, too much noise — they can’t monitor it all)?
Clive Thompson’s new article on netbooks and cloud computing suggests that it might be a little bit of both:
In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen famously argued that true breakthroughs almost always come from upstarts, since profitable firms rarely want to upend their business models. “Netbooks are a classic Christensenian disruptive innovation for the PC industry,” says Willy Shih, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied both Quanta’s work on the One Laptop per Child project and Asustek’s development of the netbook…
A really powerful application like Adobe Photoshop demands a much faster processor [than a netbook’s]. But consider my experience: This spring, after my regular Windows XP laptop began crashing twice a day, I reformatted the hard drive. As I went about reinstalling my software, I couldn’t find my Photoshop disc. I forgot about it
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In fact, the one Unix-y test that the iPhone fails is that its apps can’t talk to each other. Of course, neither can tabs in a browser window. In both cases, this is dumb, and bad — and smarter people than me need to figure out a good way to solve it. (It’s amazing that Apple, whose common applications really DO talk to each other amazingly well, hasn’t figured out a way to do this on the phone that’s secure, usable, resource-smart, and doesn’t crash the whole thing.)
Have you tried Google Chrome yet, Tim? I think it does the best job (so far) of getting out of the way — of making the browser sort of disappear. I could absolutely imagine a pretty functional netbook w/ no OS; just Google Chrome.
Chrome is great. I don’t use Windows much these days, but I basically pimped Safari 4 to work like Chrome, and then I’ve got Firefox-plus-extensions for most browsing. I also use Fluid to make an SSB for Gmail (and Facebook, but that’s less successful.)
But I love teeny client apps. Even Chrome is too much browser to do what Twitteriffic or Dropbox do; iTunes and Songbird are better for music; NetNewsWire/MarsEdit for reading/writing blogs, etc… (despite the fact that MarsEdit can’t talk to Movable Type to save its life…)