Adam Bosworth: Detour
"Why has the web kept its gesture of user interactions so small? I believe it is because most web applications are not intended for frequent/daily use. Instead of the old model in which you use 2 or 3 applications every day you tend to interact with hundreds or more every month or so. In this world, ease of use and discoverability are paramount, ease of authoring is key, and simplicity is all. Of course there are many applications that scream out for a product like [Macromedia] Central. […]
This is not, to me, the ideal model for Amazon.com or BMW or my 401K application in my company portal or my broker. These are not applications I use everyday let alone frequently during a day. They are applications I run when I have a specific task in mind and I expect them to fit the usability rules of the browser. Mostly they behave just as I wish unless I go offline or I want to sort or filter in ways that they didn’t expect/predict.
In short, I think there is room for both. I think Macromedia is heading in exactly the right direction and have told Kevin Lynch so. At the same time, I think that there is a need for a plain old browser that can interact with the server at the information level and I think there is also a need for Central. We don’t use only one size and type of screwdriver. Why should this world be different?"