I’m getting more and more reluctant to pass along links to family and friends to download certain rich-client apps, no matter how good the apps are. Why? Increasingly these demo or free apps are bundled with other “stuff.” In some cases, the “other” stuff is innocuous. However, sometimes it can lead to another mess and a panicked phone call helping the person restore their system to the way it was before. For instance, browsers are so important to the way that many of my friends and family work and connect with the world, that if an app makes any change to their browser that isn’t absolutely necessary, the program goes on my don’t-recommend-list. (By the way, a mess is growing around apps that launch on start-up too. So my black list may be growing even larger.)
Yes, many times I can warn them of the issues that lie ahead and give them instructions on which checkboxes to uncheck or dialogs to double-check, however, at about this time, they begin to wonder if this new great app is really worth it. If I’m not right there, sitting next to them, it may not be.
One easy fix is to voluntarily not enable unnecessary, bundled apps in an install program. Require the user to check a box if they want a bundled app. If this approach can’t make it past the marketing folks, an alternative is to offer a “thin” install somewhere on the company site that people like us can find and provide links to. Go ahead and leave the thick installs in prominent positions, but give us others a link to a “thin” install which we can recommend.
Seems to me that the top-tier, rich-client apps are giving users one more reason to stay in or migrate to the browser. Is this really what they want?
The one that really annoys me is having to install iTunes when all I want is QuickTime. iTunes then installs a permanently running service to monitor my iPod, which I don’t have. This is very impolite.
By the same argument I guess you can tell them not to use MS Office or Windows because it’s so easy to get viruses. Or maybe you prefer web-based alternatives to them?
This whole “web is taking over the desktop” nonsense is short-lived. Come on, Loren. You’ve been around this business longer than I have and I’ve seen this prophecy twice already.
Web applications can’t do anything useful anyway. Are your friends and families going to use web-based media players? Better download a nice spyware-infested plugin for that. How about a web-based cd-burning software? Better download a plugin. How about web-based antivirus and antispyware? Ha, I’d like to see a plugin that could do that.
The all-powerful browser experience is going to be a victim of its own rules. Everybody wants the browsers to adhere strictly to standards. Well do you know how slowly things move through standards bodies? If it wasn’t for good old nonstandard Microsoft you wouldn’t even have AJAX.
When do you think the web will catch up to WPF or Indigo? Hell, when do you think the web will catch up to Windows Forms? Not for a very long time and I think people are going to get sick of looking at ugly Google software that runs in a sandbox.
No thanks, I’ll take the “download, run, installed” experience over the “give all my info, wait for invite email, click a link, wait for web page to load, log in, verify my email, log out, forgot to add to favorites, so type url again, log in, find that it’s been updated without my consent, etc.” experience any day.
I agree!! I agree!! I agree!!
In my own world as an internal IT business consultant in a government agency, I have gone almost totally to web app’s. I need to access my data everywhere and I am tired of forgetting by 2gb usb drive. It is so easy for me to share data now by simply cutting and pasting into my internal project web site. The Google Notebook is a particular lifesaver, I use it as a daily work diary.
We are looking “thin” agency wide from thin clients to thin/web based software, it is the way of the future and it is fast approaching.
Julian, Agreed. QuickTime on Windows makes me a fan of Flash or WMV for viewing movies.
Josh, I’m not arguing that we get rid of rich-client apps at all. I develop them after all. But the marketing, packaging, and positioning of them often makes more sense sometimes when they are considered the only game in town. However, with browser-based solutions pushing from the low end, publishers need to be careful how they leverage position in the market. I don’t blame them for buying position in each others products or creating bundles, but installing a toolbar in the browser in order to install a messenger app? That’s unexpected and only helps to confuse the user.
Oh, and “thickness” issues are not only a concern of rich-client apps. Google thin search experience (along with its great search results) edged out competitors which were all going “thick” at the time. MSN Search is another search property that is going “thin” as it rebrands its search as part of live.com. I’d argue too the first generation web stayed thin as it try to avoid the thickness of services such as Prodigy.
As I see it we’re in a phase of a technological and marketing cycle where rich-client/service/etc publishers need to be extra careful not to push too hard or they’ll help push the market away.
motocrossed: The trend as I see it will be to make the browser experience richer and richer and at the same time keep the administration thin.
Hey Loren, I also emailed you because I confess, I read your blog post incorrectly the first time and assumed it was a swipe at all installable software because of a few bad apples.
I had hoped that you would get the email before approving the post but since it’s up there, I’ll say I do agree with you about people loading crap. In fact, that’s the reason why I don’t even create a start menu entry for TEO because I don’t want to be one of those guys leaving a system in a messy state.
My trigger happy response was because I am quite on edge lately because of the general concensus that “this time” web applications are finally going to kill the desktop and I read your article with bias after misinterpreting the headline as “not recommending installable software” instead of what I believe you’re actually saying which is “not recommending crap that bundles stuff like music services and toolbars” which I wholeheartedly agree with.
Sorry about not getting your email first, but actually I appreciate your sentiments about not giving up on rich-client apps. I’m not. I just hope most end users don’t either.