Recently in skoot Category
So a few months ago, I was asked to write some entries in the company blog about Skoot. Which is a pretty broad task. What to write? And I fussed over it, and made a few false starts at "intro to Skoot" sorts of posts, and finally it just fell off my radar for a while, and now here we are... Anyway, if you want to learn about what Skoot is, probably easiest to just head over to SkootIt.com and read about it there. (The tech writers probably can express that much more clearly than I can, anyway.) Me, I'm going to stay a little bit more conceptual, and talk about Skoot as it relates to cloud computing, a couple of articles I've seen recently, and a little bit of the Topia vision for the future.
Cloud computing, to start with, is a pretty esoteric concept. It's right there in the name...you do something on your computer, something mysterious happens "out in the cloud" (read: where you can't see it and you don't know what's happening), and whatever is supposed to happen as a result happens.
Or, to paraphrase a cultural reference from a certain South Park episode:
The first of the articles that caught my eye is "Cloudy Judgement" from Paul Boutin at Slate. Boutin examines software as a service (SaaS), specifically looking at online photo editing with Photoshop Express and online office productivity with Google Docs. He ultimately concludes:
On to the next article. "Architecture Astronauts Take Over", by Joel Spolsky on his Joel on Software blog, hits much closer to home in that his critique is of cloud computing applications remarkably similar to Skoot. His case study focuses on the various synchronization-on-the-web ventures of Ray Ozzie, the first of which is Groove (essentially Lotus Notes with peer-to-peer synchronization), and now the newly-released Windows Live Mesh (in his words "Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time"). Spolsky sees no general use for these applications, terming Ozzie an "architecture astronaut": one who doesn't solve an actual problem, just attempts to solve something that, in theory, may solve a whole series of problems.
The vision of Topia is a world in which people plug their computer into the wall, can use their applications, and everything just works. If they have network connectivity, those applications will interact with the cloud to enhance the user experience, store data, etc. (And if they don't have network connectivity, such as on an airplane, they can still be productive.) But that's the core thing: network connectedness, while in some ways core to the full-functionality of the application, is invisible to the user.
Which is all very pie-in-the-sky, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. And if Skoot, in offering a file storage/sharing application that can operate both online and offline, is one small step on Topia's way towards realizing this vision, then I hardly see it as just a trivial "programming exercise".
(courtesy: akakumo@flickr)
Cloud computing, to start with, is a pretty esoteric concept. It's right there in the name...you do something on your computer, something mysterious happens "out in the cloud" (read: where you can't see it and you don't know what's happening), and whatever is supposed to happen as a result happens.
Or, to paraphrase a cultural reference from a certain South Park episode:
- Do something
- ?
- Magical result somewhere in the network
- (maybe some profit, too)
The first of the articles that caught my eye is "Cloudy Judgement" from Paul Boutin at Slate. Boutin examines software as a service (SaaS), specifically looking at online photo editing with Photoshop Express and online office productivity with Google Docs. He ultimately concludes:
"For me, it'll be years before Photoshop Express can become powerful enough to replace my desktop version, or before Google Docs gets me to uninstall Microsoft Office. I'm not sure I want to. One of the nice things about Word and Photoshop is that once I fire them up and start working, I can forget all about the Internet for a few hours."My big problem with this article, and ultimately his conclusion, is that his method of analyzing "cloud computing" is to analyze a bunch of browser applications that are trying to overcome some clunky browser limitations to offer a desktop-like experience. This is fine, if course, if he's just saying "not yet", but I think his dismissal short-sells the possibility of non-browser-based applications using the cloud to enhance the user experience. And I think Skoot, and the overall Topia vision, imagine a framework where applications are able to stand alone, but enrich the experience for the user by leveraging "the cloud" for data storage/transmission/whatever, in a way invisible to the user. The shortcomings that Boutin claims ultimately boil down not to problems with the cloud, but problems with how applications are designed. With Skoot, we aim to provide an application that "just works". You create workspaces, invite others, add files, and somehow, magically, after the question mark stage, those files make it to the other members of the workspace. And, if we've done our jobs, it was a pleasant, easy process for all parties involved.
On to the next article. "Architecture Astronauts Take Over", by Joel Spolsky on his Joel on Software blog, hits much closer to home in that his critique is of cloud computing applications remarkably similar to Skoot. His case study focuses on the various synchronization-on-the-web ventures of Ray Ozzie, the first of which is Groove (essentially Lotus Notes with peer-to-peer synchronization), and now the newly-released Windows Live Mesh (in his words "Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time"). Spolsky sees no general use for these applications, terming Ozzie an "architecture astronaut": one who doesn't solve an actual problem, just attempts to solve something that, in theory, may solve a whole series of problems.
"...the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him...this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out."Now, I respect a lot of what Joel has to say about software development, but I have to call him on this one. Granted, maybe just synchronizing some files to the web isn't a big deal, and maybe on it's own it's not the hardest problem in the world. But at the same time, people ultimately want to have access to their files, their information, their address book, etc., everywhere they go–on their work computer, their home computer, the public terminal at the library, etc. And guess what, that means that there needs to be some mechanism "in the cloud" (with the astronauts?) that facilitates this. It seems to me like implicit in him saying that they're trying to do something that "isn't so hard that they can't figure it out" is the notion that a truly useful is too hard, so why try to figure it out. People want applications that are enriched by the cloud, they just don't want to know when and how it's happening, and probably don't even want to be aware that "cloud computing" has anything to do with what they're doing.
The vision of Topia is a world in which people plug their computer into the wall, can use their applications, and everything just works. If they have network connectivity, those applications will interact with the cloud to enhance the user experience, store data, etc. (And if they don't have network connectivity, such as on an airplane, they can still be productive.) But that's the core thing: network connectedness, while in some ways core to the full-functionality of the application, is invisible to the user.
Which is all very pie-in-the-sky, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. And if Skoot, in offering a file storage/sharing application that can operate both online and offline, is one small step on Topia's way towards realizing this vision, then I hardly see it as just a trivial "programming exercise".
