Back in 1996, when I first entered the tech industry, I was 16 and I was working for a company called Infonautics Corporation in Wayne, PA. The whole internet revolution thing was happening although I really didn't understand it at the time. Later on, I started to realize when everybody was coming up with these dot com startups, that a lot of people had gotten very rich, very quickly, without ever actually running a profitable business. As company after company folded and people were being laid off by the thousands, I realized that if I had been born 10 years earlier, I too probably could have been rich. “Oh well,” I thought, “I missed my opportunity to get rich quick. Guess I have to either invent a time machine or make money the old fashioned way.”
Fast forward 10 years to 2006 and guess what. I'm 10 years older and the whole freakin' thing is happening all over again. Why am I not rich? Why am I not one of the guys writing some cool web calendar with tags and social networking and using AJAX to glue it all together?
It's not because I can't do it. I'd like to think I'm a pretty decent developer. I'm no stranger to web development. I don't particularly enjoy it and I'm by no means a graphic designer, but I have a very good understanding of the technology and I've done it for years. It's not because I don't have any ideas (I don't, but that's not the reason) because I could just pick a random TechCrunch article and do the same type of application and give it some Web 2.0-sounding name like Beezalo or something and start pitching it to VC's as the next Flickr or MySpace.
We can come up with a business plan later.
So why am I not taking advantage of what could only be described as a “De Lorean for the tech industry”? Because I have a real problem with people that proclaim the desktop is dead and that Google will eat Microsoft alive with their endless stream of “me too” beta products. What's the best part of having a time machine to go back to the past? The ability to do things differently. But why am I hearing the same old rhetoric? Why is Silicon Valley the place to be when the internet has no borders. And wasn't Java supposed to kill Microsoft since applets could be written once and run everywhere? I'll post in a follow-up article about why the web won't kill desktop software and Microsoft is gonna be just fine.
Anyway, the reason is because you can't sell something you don't believe in. And I don't believe in it. I don't want to live in a web-centric world and I don't want to have 100 web pages open on my desktop to do everything I need to do. I'm waiting for a new revolution and it won't be nearly as “cool” as Web 2.0, but it will be more practical and you don't even realize it's already starting. I guess I'll unoriginally call it Client 2.0.