Google failures

There has been some recent blogging about Google failures, like in Google’s Past Failures Offer Perspective on Chrome OS Release. There seems to be a list of failures that bloggers repeat, I found it in English and translated into Spanish.

The list was relaunched in the occassion of the announcement of the Chrome OS as an open source product. Randall C. Kennedy of InfoWorld blog post about Chrome OS failure was the trigger.

IMO his view about Crome OS is a bit shortsighted in that it does not allow headroom for evolution. The same arguments he raises today as of Novenber 2009 about Chrome OS could have been raised about Gmail in 2004 April fool day when it was first released. But Gmail did not flop, not at all. Even considering that the arguments were more sound by then.

Chrome OS is not like Windows in that it does not come out in a finished version but it is open for that kind of continuous evolution that makes software "getting better all the time" as The Beatles sang.

Let's not talk abot how it is but about what can we do to shape it to be valuable.

Google success

Despite its name this blog is not about Google failure but success. It is about trying to call their attention to make them more successful so the users can squeeze more value from Google's products lineup.

Each and every time Google comes out with an useful and usable application, the users life is a litle better.

So if Google keeps trying to enrichen their offering, thay are welcome.

Lively & the realisting paradigm

I can't believe they launched Lively, based in a real world realistic paradigm! Why didn't they ask me!

Almost all applications based on realistic paradigms fail. This is because the computer version will never be as "real" as the real version, and on the other hand the realistic design deprives them from leveraging the advantages of the computer.

Another company, Microsoft, released a few realistic products that flopped. It's said that the roots of these producte are in the mind of Bill Gates' wife. May be.

Posting is a pain

Posting in the Blogger UI is a pain, one posts struggling against the system instead of being helped by it.

The first noticeable bit is the working area. In my modest 1024x768 screen only 21% of the pixels are devoted to input text, the rest is mostly flat blank or dark blue. Few artifacts, this is good.

Hey, I paid for the whole screen, why should I want to use only 1/5 of it?

An example comes to mind: the visualization and edition of environment variables in Windows. It is done in fixed-size small windows that didn't make much sense in 640x480 screens and are ridiculous as of today's resolutions.

As I said, this is the first bit. There are so many! For example whilst editing HTML, newlines become line breaks instead of being handled as blank space. A newline in the HTML source is replaced by a ... hmm, I already struggled trying to show tags here ... lets try, newlines are illegally converted in <br> tags.

The very first GWT conference has started today

The first GWT conference

I don't go to such conferences. It's not that I don't want to, I'm too far away and currency exchange is not at all convenient (by a factor of three) so I have to observe them as an outsider. I have observed many, since the first JavaOne and before.

Usually the first few conferences on each new technology convey all the excitement, the feeling of being pioneers, a sense of evangelism.

A new and promising technology captures the vested interest of thousands, usually because it promises to solve all the pending problems or because it appears to be an opportunity to make big money.

The GWT opportunity

That said, GWT is also a huge opportunity for the IT masses to solve a pesky problem that has been always endemic to computer systems. Because it is a product positioned near the User Interface and computer systems too often deny the user.

Unfortunately it seems as if the focus still were the computer ...

From the conference site ...

"Google Web Toolkit enables developers to use their favorite Java tools to build AJAX applications without having to tackle the steep learning curve and quirks of JavaScript and CSS. The Voices That Matter: Google Web Toolkit Conference will insure you understand why this is so and how you can leverage the power and functionality of GWT for your applications."

The text above is the very first paragraph from the landing page. By reading it one can not follow that this is a user-focused conference. It'sall about developers, once again.

In the last paragraph of an inner page the good news appear. Under What is Google Web Toolkit? one can read ...

"The GWT engineering team makes this abundantly clear by stating unapologetically that when there is a choice to be made between "easy for the user" versus "easy for the developer," "easy for the user" wins. That may be a surprising sentiment coming from tool builders, but, then again, their first design axiom is four words: User experience is primary."

There is that candid passage where the author says that this " ... may be a surprising sentiment ... " and yes, it is surprising, a nice surprise.

Who is the conference for?

Obviously the GWT Conference is for developers, technologists, like me and most of the featured speakers. With a couple "usability" sparks, IMO too lame.

It's also clear that one can't make a user advocate out of a hardcore IT geek in the lapse from monday thry Thursday at 1:30PM.

The fact is that GWT solves a problem to the developers, that of having to write Javascript for the UI. Besides that, it could even be harmful from the point of view of the users, leaving them at the sole mercy of the Java developers.

There is nothing wrong with Java developers, many of my friends ara Java developers ...

Seriously, it's not the developer's fault. Can't explain it now ... it's in Alan Coopers book "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum."

The technology and the solution

A technology is not a solution but a tool. Supposedly it will be easierfor a Java developer to build a UI using GWT. This is not to say that the application will be necessarily better, read on ...

Many years ago a tool was announced, one that allowed developers top build UIs with great ease, dragging and dropping controls in a canvas. It was bundled with a well known programming language.

That tool brought GUI development to the masses, literally, and thus itwas used to build both a few good and many loathed UIs.

You know, I'm talking about Microsoft's Visual Basic. VB applications were
used to "upgrade" many DOs applications, frequently with reduced usability. Yes, GUI replacements were not necessarily better for the user than their command linre counterparts, maybe Lotus 1-2-3 was the most dramatic example: the DOS version dominated the spreadsheet marked but the GUI version fumbled.

The bottom line

Althought Java in the server plus GWT for the UI plus the developer sounds like three of a perfect pair, that does not mean that any application is going to be plain better.

In fact, we'll see worse applications because GWT is doing a good job in lowering the threshold.

I revolve thinking about how to help even the most hardcore geeky
devlopers to build usable applications.

Trivia

Alan Cooper, the guy who wrote the "inmates" book, is also the one who invented Visual Basic.