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April 26, 2006
Scoble Discovers U3
It looks like the U3 'standard' has begun to garner coverage in the press. Today Scoble posted a blurb in his blog about U3 accompanied by a 'wow' type response. That means that thousands of new people have just been exposed to the idea of truly portable application distribution, and given a link to the product's home page. Some of those people are developers, some of them are developers at Microsoft, and some of them will no doubt see the value in such a system. I don't know how portable applications would fit in with MS's OS strategy, but they most certainly dovetail nicely with their Office Live strategy. Perhaps the standard will get a boost from MS. Or maybe they'll embrace-extend-extinguish as they've attempted to do with so many other threats to their OS monopoly.
Whatever, the important thing is that portable application standards are getting exposure. The whole Web 2.0 thing is overblown hype. The technology stack it's built on is unwieldy and the breadth of knowledge required to build a simple application is simply too great for the paradigm to achieve mass implementation. I'm not saying that the future of the web doesn't include a lot of Web 2.0 technologies, just that the cost associated with implementing a web application in the current mold is too high to justify for most intranet/internet sites. Something that's less expensive to develop, that offers the ability to create consistent and attractive interfaces, and interacts with web services... that's what U3 promises and that's what the real next-generation killer apps will include. If U3 actually delivers on those promises it could herald a sea change in application design.
Posted by ashusta at April 26, 2006 11:00 AM