Q:
It's nice to see innovation but I wonder if you have considered performance sufficiently.A:
In retrospect it appears that the Altair led to the future. My first computer was in fact an Altair. Chuck Peddle "the father of the PC" (in his own words) did not base either the Commodore PET or the Radio Shack TRS-80 or the CPU of the Apple II (6502) on the Altair. As Stephen Jay Gould was so fond of pointing out, evolution is bushy. It only looks like a ladder in retrospect. This means that at this time there are likely to be many approaches to the next paradigm. The winner is likely to be the fastes not the most sophisticated. The Altair went nowhere because it had terrible performance and was very unreliable. The evidence of history suggests that the race will go to the swiftest.
No central point of failure is a 1980's concept. When I first taught networking peer-to-peer networking was the vision of the future. Everybody was going to have everything always and hardware weaknesses didn't matter. Of course that never worked. Ray Noorda got into networking from a background in fault tolerance. LANs abandonned the dream of no central point of failure to achieve higher performance with client server architecture. That architectural principal carried forward to the thin client on the Web.
Virtuality is also an old concept. When PC spreadsheets were young IBM struck back with virtual spreadsheets running on 360/370 hardware under the VM (Virtual Machine) OS. I ran speed tests at the time. Even a stinky 6502 based second generation PC running Visi-Calc was faster than a mainframe running ADRS on VM. A bit later the second generation of spreadsheets included two new offering Lotus 1-2-3 and MBA. MBA ran under the UC-p system OS. It had far more features than 1-2-3 but it was much slower. The race went to the swiftest.
Google is popular because Google is so fast. If you want investors to back a change in architecture show them how how fast your solution is not how many features it has.
Also the idea that users are interested in a decentralized architecture is contrary to the historical record. The IBM PC was not the best computer in 1981. I much preferred the Sirius 9000 but the public was attracted to the big name. Similarly today Microsoft enjoys continued success at least in part because it is big and has an overwhelming market presence.
Political conservatives hate big government. Liberals hate big business. There is something to be said for both attitudes. But voters are attracted big government and consumers like big central private enterprises.
What is your business model? How and when do you recoup your investment? Or is this another quasi-political statement technology like Linux? Linux users endure an inferior product so as to be able to make a political statement. So do Prius drivers. Is that your purpose?
The PC experience you wish to emulate is the result of centralization (Gates and Jobs) not decentralization.
BTW what's wrong with AJAX? My instinct is that a technology that improves the performance of current distributed applications will do well. The best AJAX using sites are now remarkably PC like.
I am not trying to do something, that has already been done, faster or better. So it's hard to explain. Rather like explaining the World Wide Web, before there was one. Can you imagine? Hey look! This page comes from another computer. And when you click on this underlined word you get another page! Big deal. It's only when you get some content that you can begin to appreciate it as a phenomenon.
Anyway, all those features that look so last millennium to you are not the point. The point is to create a system in which applications can be delivered as services (which is already being done, e.g. Salesforce.com) but in which they don't all live in their own silos, isolated from one another, but appear to coexist in the user's own workspace - i.e. the applications know that they can cooperate with each other, and the user can integrate applications ad hoc. That does not yet exist.
Performance is not an issue because I am not proposing to distribute applications. I am proposing to integrate applications that are already distributed.
My comparison with the Altair is not meant to be taken too literally. Yes, I know that the Altair was junk, and none of the following PCs were in its direct lineage. I use that comparison because at this stage Domicel is comparable to the Altair, both in being first, and in being too primitive for anyone but the most dedicated hobbyist. Naturally, though, I hope it will have a brighter future.
No central point of failure and virtuality are old concepts, it is true. But they are still important. I see them as key features of the system, but they are means to an end.
The business model is very simple: sell the server. (We can talk about pricing schemes separately. Email me if you want more details.) The selling point, before critical mass is reached, is the ease of integration which it gives the end user, and the developer. Though, when a critical mass of applications become part of the Domisphere, it will simply become mandatory, like the World Wide Web.
I am not really seeking to "emulate the PC" - I just use that line to try to get the user experience across. The key feature is the delivery of applications as services over the internet, and being able to integrate them ad-hoc. Companies like Citrix try to emulate the PC, which just means that your ordinary finite PC is not on your desk, but somewhere else.
I have nothing against AJAX, in fact, I love it, and use it! AJAX is a way of delivering a UI of a single application - it is orthogonal to Domicel.
Posted by David Boxenhorn at December 7, 2005 04:32 PM
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