Do we really want web applications?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Libervis Sep 11, 2006 11:27 AM EDT |
Now let us get this straight. How many of you are really thrilled about web applications and the whole software as a service thing? How content you really are about having an increasing number of your applications hosted for you on someone elses computer and under someone elses control? At first I was, for some weird reason and probably temporarily caught by the hype, kind of excited about the whole thing, but now I'm not so sure. To be honest I wouldn't like to use some online service for everything I do on my computer from office work to I don't know what. Heck I still like my email delivered to my email client (using sylpheed now) through POP rather than using someone elses webmail program. It is said that the huge benefit of web applications is in that everything you do is hosted on a server accessible from everywhere you go. Big deal! You can just as much use an application on your personal computer and just upload the resulting files to a personal web space that almost everybody can afford now if you want it accessible from anywhere. You don't need the whole application hosted by some company for that. Thin clients connected to fat servers? Sure that's cool too, but that doesn't mean the fat server needs to be some company's server running all your productivity applications. You can run your own fat server at home and connect to it from your other less expensive computers (laptops, mobile phones and whatever). This may even be a real business opportunity for some companies where they could sell you pre-configured fat server - thin client home systems. So what's the big deal with web applications? How exciting and welcome that really is? I'm not sure we need a Google "Desktop 2.0" OS with whoever they may develop it. What do you think? |
| techiem2 Sep 11, 2006 11:37 AM EDT |
Frankly, the only real benefit I see other than the "convenience" is that supposedly your data will be properly backed up. On the other hand, your data is stored on somebody else's server... Which would worry me for any confidential information. Not to mention what happens when you can't connect to web app provider. |
| number6x Sep 11, 2006 11:49 AM EDT |
The vast majority of code being used in the business world is written by businesses for themselves. The amount of COBOL code sitting on mainframes in banks, insurance companies, retailers, and manufacturers dwarfs the code output by Microsoft, Sun, Apple and the Linux community combined. Many of these companies are still using 1970's era CICS "green-screen" apps fronting mainframe DB2 or even mainframe VSAM (Indexed files for Mainframes) backed systems. These businesses desperately want web based apps for their own internal use. It allows them to utilize their existing mainframe data stores and give their internal users modern gui front ends. This is big business. Businesses spend much more each year writing their own software than they do paying Microsoft for licenses for things like Windows and Office. You are right to question |
| SFN Sep 11, 2006 12:15 PM EDT |
Quoting:The vast majority of code being used in the business world is written by businesses for themselves. The amount of COBOL code sitting on mainframes in banks, insurance companies, retailers, and manufacturers dwarfs the code output by Microsoft, Sun, Apple and the Linux community combined. Actually, most banks don't do most of their own coding. The common perception is that most banks are massive institutions on the order of Wells Fargo, BofA and Citibank. In reality, most banks are what are referred to as community banks with asset sizes under $1B. (Sounds like a lot but in the big scheme of things, it's not) Most community banks outsource their core apps, if not all of their apps. We were just having a discussion in our department the other day about software as a service. Although we have to go with whatever the company says and (like the bankers in those WAMU Free Checking ads) bankers tend to be sheep-like, our basic take is "no f^$*king way". Especially with the ever growing government restrictions on how we handle information, moving to web-based apps for a community bank would be an incredibly stupid move. |
| Libervis Sep 11, 2006 12:30 PM EDT |
It is one thing to use web applications for online collaboration. That is understandable as much as it is understandable using web forums (which is an application too) for online discussions. But for general productivity which doesn't involve collaborating with someone else, I'm not sure we need it. I think that if too many companies get into their heads that people somehow want to transfer all their desktop computing to the web and start pumping alot of cash in it, they might just end up getting over themselves which could possibly lead to a sort of another bubble and subsequent burst. It happens when investors and enterprises get out of touch with what users really want. If users don't want their desktop computing transfered to the web and corporations pump money into it, they're looking for trouble. |
| nalf38 Sep 11, 2006 2:26 PM EDT |
Yeah, I totally get being able to use one browser window to access green-screen legacy apps, but a word processor? If I were stuck someplace with a computer that didn't have MSOffice/OpenOffice/Wordperfect/you-name-it, maybe. But what's the point for home users, besides convenience (which is debatable)? |
| number6x Sep 11, 2006 3:56 PM EDT |
SFN, I've made a pretty good living for the last two decades at banks and insurance companies that write their own apps. Two of the banks and one of the insurance companies I've contracted at sell processing services to smaller banks and smaller insurers. I don't think federal law allows the banks to outsource the bank stuff out of the country. Insurance is so heavily state regulated outsourcing is dificult, but not impossible to even get insurance processed from state to state. You can do it, but you just need massively different sets of business rules depending on the state. I've been on a few projects that have tried to keep the common, and the different logic and rules straight. It was an adventure. The software is so industry specific, and has to change so quickly with the changing regulation, that paying a software company to develop it would be very costly. Software companies make money writing very general use things like OS's and word processors. The more specific the software becomes the smaller your customer base is. Sure you can charge more, but the extra work you put in to get it all correct is pretty dificult. I bet the banks you have seen 'outsourcing' are really just using the transaction processing systems written by other larger banks. Right now I'm working on a project for BSBCA, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. That's the organization that licenses the individual Blue Cross plans on a state by state basis. The software is designed for passing information from the many different claims processing systems that each of the individual Blue's runs. This is the first major re-write since the early 90's. both the CICS and the web based functionality will be supported for several years before the CICS is phased out. Its quite a project, and after we deliver it will have to go through months of audits by each of the state agencies that the individual Blues have to answer to. It takes a long time to create, test and implement these things. The demand for programmers is always high in these industries. |
| SFN Sep 12, 2006 4:50 AM EDT |
Quoting:I bet the banks you have seen 'outsourcing' are really just using the transaction processing systems written by other larger banks. Yes. That is what they do. They definitely don't write those pieces themselves. The banks that create those systems are not the majority of banks, though. Back to web apps though, I don't know of any core processing systems that run via the web. I think you'd agree that running core banking apps across the web would be suicide. I can't speak to insurance firms as I've never worked in that industry. |
| dek Sep 12, 2006 5:40 AM EDT |
SFN: I think you'd agree that running core banking apps across the web would be suicide. OH YES!! A Security nightmare. If my bank announced that they were doing that, I'd be switching banks!! When I worked for USWest/Qwest and Qwest took over, IIRC they had some hair brained idea like this. Don't recall that it went anywhere. Personally, I don't like web apps that much except for certain limited applications like forms and reports. Running core apps on the web is tantamount to suicide, as SFN indicated. Where does all this Web App stuff come from? To me, it begins with the CIO. Some, if not most, CIO's are of the seagull variety; they come in with a big spiel, they have a nice big hook -- usually in the form of doing more processing via the web, they thoroughly mess things up and five years later they leave. And the cycle repeats. Don't really know how to get a handle on this except by adopting better corporate governance proceedures. Don K. |
| dcparris Sep 12, 2006 5:55 AM EDT |
Some are offering church management database services over the web. One guy asked me if I had any input regarding why churches don't seem interested. I responded that, while I wouldn't mind having some functionality on the Internet, wouldn't want critical data regarding our members and finances on the web. For me, the web might be good for conducting transactions, but I want my core data and docs behind my firewall. For example, the goal behind CHADDB (which I was attempting to develop) was to allow cell/home group leaders to submit reports over the web that we could download and import into the local DB. One church has this, but their program is just an e-mailable web form. The web reporting functionality would be an optional module. There's just no way, though, that I would risk reports about contributions, counseling, and so forth to be store on the web. The same goes for my office suite. |
| tuxchick2 Sep 12, 2006 8:52 AM EDT |
Web apps make sense for casual users of the "don't bother me with knowledge, just make it go" class. Turn their computing into picking up a dumb interface widget connected to a smart server, like telephone service. Then all they have to do is hit the "on" switch, do their chores, and hangup. Someone else does the backups, and system and software maintenance. The one locally-managed task is printing, which even the least capable techno-gumby seems to be capable of handling. People already pay $70+ per month for television and more than that for phone yakking, so I don't see why this wouldn't work |
| number6x Sep 12, 2006 12:57 PM EDT |
Web apps remind me a lot of web services. The marketing guys, the venture capitolists, the tech press keeps thinking these will be a path the next Microsoft money machine. The actual implementations are like the in house web apps at big companies I mentioned above. Everything is on the company intranet, nothing gets outside. At one insurer we wrote web services for people to call when they wanted to query some commonly used membership information. It worked great because claims being processed real time would result in several calls from different systems over a short period of time. Say a new claim comes in, it gets entered, then a little up front work and a payment goes out. By tweaking our cached information for the web services, we could keep much of the membership info needed for one clean claim to process from start to finish reducing the multiple hits on the Database. If there were issues on the claim that made it take hours or days the cache would expire, but overall things were better. No one in their right mind would ship that same info over the internet. But web services as in house 'called routines' are a great idea. They're not going to make you the big buck that way, but they make sharing code easier in some cases. |
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