The big Techmeme story of the day is that 73% of Americans haven't even heard of online office alternatives.  To quote Duncan Riley of TechCrunch...

Google and others are working hard to change the way businesses use basic services such as wordprocessing with a continued marketing push into the enterprise sector. The challenge is to overcome over 25+ years of what people consider to be normal (desktop apps) by proving that the online alternative is ready and capable of being used. There’s little doubt today, at least based on OS X and Linux adoption figures that there is a very real and definite move away from Microsoft, accelerated by the disaster that is Vista. Whilst there are always desktop alternatives on both platforms, there will be a continuing number of users who question the need to buy Microsoft Office, be that as an upgrade for an existing OS, or brand new as they switch to Mac. It’s a slow switch, but given the online alternatives there is little doubt that the number making the switch to online apps will continue to grow.

I think there is a lot of truth to the above statement but the one thing I would add is that I think the real disaster Microsoft is going to face (in this arena) isn't Vista its Office 2007. 

Office 2007 is deceptive because its received fairly positive reviews from the type of people who review things for a living.  But as someone who has done usability testing with actual users I can say it was nothing short of a disaster.  The new UI essentially makes the suite a new program so what you get is either users digging through tabs trying desperately to find the command they need or users trying repeatedly to use shortcuts that no longer work.   All the time what they are really trying to do is unlearn over a decade worth of previously gained knowledge of Office.  It wasn't a pretty sight and when people go to upgrade I think they'll find they're essentially choosing from two all new solutions.  One of which is free.

Again, not good for Microsoft.

That said, until the online office crowd wises up and makes some kind of solution like Google's Search Appliance for these suites I don't think they'll get much traction in the enterprise.  No serious enterprise is going to put all their data on Google's servers given the lack of guarantees that Google offers up in regards to that data. 

There is a lot of talk in the blogosphere about Techmeme and how effective it is at chronicling everything that goes on in the blogs.  I have no interest in being part of that debate because, to be honest, I don't really care.

For me, and I have to admit I stole this observation from Scoble's late night Techmeme video,  but for me Techmeme is simply Gabe Rivera's linkblog and that's good enough.  Does it matter to me that it might not pick up some great idea on a small blog somewhere out there...not really.  It's entertaining to me as it is and that is all I ask of any site that I frequent.

So maybe Techmeme won't manage to find the next big thing but it will find a lot of good stuff.  Beyond that it does a good job of documenting the "A-List" bloggers which allows me to ignore those blogs for the most part.  I mean, I like Jeff Jarvis and I'm glad a lot of people enjoy reading his blog every day...but I don't.  That said I do think he has some very interesting things to say and when one of those "very" interesting things come along I know that Techmeme will let me know about it. 

Finally, and this is a bit of an aside, but I just wanted to say that I think Techmeme has the classiest system of dealing with ads that I've seen on the web.  Their off to the side with graphics so they draw attention if you are interested but don't bother if you aren't.  Then they are ever so subtly slipped into the site's RSS feed in one big post so that I can check them out if I want to or again ignore them if I want.  Beyond that they are forced to actually use blog posts as their ads which makes it much more likely that you'll get something useful if you are interested in the ad. 

Anyway, all of the above things make Techmeme #2 on my Blogroll list.

Hopefully this will be my last SimpleDB post for a while since I think I've spent way too much time on this(especially for a guy who should be laying off the blogging this week because he has way too much stuff to do already).  But I felt the need to quote this post from uncov.com.  It says...

One of the stupid parts about SimpleDB is XML. All of the query responses come back to the client as a blob of XML. Of course, as a blub coder, you don't see any of this because you are just using an API, so why should you care?

Let's have a gander at a typical query response from SimpleDB, provided in the developer documentation:

<QueryResponse xmlns="http://sdb.amazonaws.com/doc/2007-11-07"> <QueryResult> <ItemName>eID001</ItemName> <ItemName>eID002</ItemName> <ItemName>eID003</ItemName> </QueryResult> <ResponseMetadata> <RequestId>c74ef8c8-77ff-4d5e-b60b-097c77c1c266</RequestId> <BoxUsage>0.0000219907</BoxUsage> </ResponseMetadata> </QueryResponse>

 

Well, that's just fantastic. A 316-byte response when all you need is 18 bytes worth of data (the 3 unique identifiers). A 1,755% transmission overhead. And don't you give me shit about needing that RequestID, that is a consequence of the protocol.

Now that is a good point.  Looking over my last few posts on this topic I think I come across as a SimpleDB advocate but that isn't necessarily the case.  All I've been trying to say in my previous posts was that the criticisms should be fair.

Anything has advantages and drawback and that is more true of SimpleDB than it is of most things.  I'm all for putting the negatives out there as long as they're valid.  The above quote is just that which is why I wanted to put it out there.