On 17 Nov 2005, at 04:46, Dan Shafer wrote:

Pricing models will change. We'll see pay-per-use, pay-per-month, pay-per-file, pay-per-K and other similar models. When it's not necessary for the manufacturer to package, distribute, sell, track, upgrade and otherwise deal with thousands and thousands of copies of the software out there -- and when piracy becomes all but extinct thanks to the new models -- software prices will dive while profit margins remain high.

Can't help myself - irresistibly prodded.

This may get a little philosophical - so I keep it short. Centralisation of data is not only dangerous socially, but economically. We have game companies to thank for ubiquitous, powerful desktop machines. Natural business means diversity of processing and always processing data at the lowest possible level - higher levels of abstraction are necessary, but always slower and more expensive. Diversity of processing is not only more efficient, it drives down prices and provides a firm base for evolutionary growth of new technologies.

We now have dirt cheap ubiquitous processing and high capacity local storage - these things will keep being used, experimented with and many new application developed to make use of their capacity. The question is only how do the data and GUI processes that run on this cheap end user hardware fit more productively into a connected world.

Dan - your focus on thin clients over the other much more important issues regarding AJAX technology and web services is in my opinion a distraction. Make use of the local processor. Make use of the hard disk. Figure out how to author and make use of web services. Sort security. Sort data synchronisation to online storage.

On Nov 16, 2005, at 9:43 PM, Alex Tweedly wrote:

I don't believe that a "Web-Photoshop" would need to satisfy the digital photography professional (mapping professionals aren't using Google Maps !). I think to get a commercially successful web- based photography editing app you need to satisfy 75% of the population - who start out with 3-6M-pixel photos compressed down to 1/2Mb JPEGs, not the pros using 32Mb RAW images,.


Is one implication that, in the brave new web-app world, professional-grade applications -- because nobody but professionals will be using them -- will get really, really expensive? Yes, many are now; but many aren't.

There was a great project - French company that used server side image files which you could edit client side only sending the compressed changes back and forth - effectively allowing the manipulation of screen resolution images on your client machine to apply the right changes to the larger online image - swallowed by the same sort of merger process that killed mTroplois I believe.

A number of people are interested in the same for Video - edit your local low resolution copy on your laptop, have these changes render your videos on the server without taking up your own CPU cycles. Also some very mature open source projects now in the area of network processing - particularly 3D rendering. Summary - expect to slowly see a number of quality media related web services allowing you to process your heavy media files without requiring a G5.

But do not expect any of these interfaces to be in Internet Explorer - or anything resembling it. They will be made in something resembling Revolution. They almost certainly would be if Rev was open source - they will probably be made in something else if we and RunRev don't get where this is going.

Question: if you wanted to knock together a quick cross platform photo-editing application which used web services to upload the images and metadata to Flicr for instance - what language would you use?

Question: if you wanted to knock together a quick cross platform video-editting application for laptop journalists which used web services to upload the video clips and metadata to a mobile phone service for instance - what language would you use?

I for one would not use a browser - Java or no Java. If this changes - then it will be because the browser has become like Revolution and we will all be switching platform.
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