Sometimes Web 2.0 is Underkill

Foldera has an interesting product that looks to take a project-centric approach to organising information.

Whilst this has been tried in the past, Foldera might have finally reached the right balance — if only they were a desktop application. But they’re not; it’s a web app, albeit a pretty ajaxian one, and I think this is an example of basically choosing the wrong platform.

Maybe they didn’t want to challenge Outlook, maybe they thought zero-install was the only way to distribute a product now, maybe they thought businesses are just waiting for the right application before moving their most important data onto an unknown providers infrastructure, maybe they thought the small-just-starting-all-we-need-is-a-web-app (something I like to call the SJSAWNIAWA sector) is a big unknown “long-tail” market… But why hamstring terrific ideas like this with the scale, speed and privacy issues of a web app.

Web 2.0 has it’s advantages, but I think sometimes the allure of being part of a new generation of web applications blinds us to the practicalities of choosing ultimately what’s best for the user.