InformationWeek

December 13, 1999

The Web Application Hosting Circus

tep right up! Come see the Greatest Show on Earth! This week's featured guest is Web-hosted applications!

A carnival-like atmosphere has always permeated this industry, where it's common to talk about the distant future as if it were just yesterday. Product rollouts, and especially new technology announcements, have always taken on the air of a three-ring circus, replete with sideshows. Lately Web hosting has taken center stage, with the barkers promising it will cure everything from overworked IT staffs to out-of-control administration costs. But to me, the Web-hosting prophets bear more than a vague resemblance to the cascade of clowns that climb out of those tiny cars under the big top.

There is something eerily familiar about this latest trend. Try to remember back before the Internet had a name or a graphical user interface, back when there was still some lingering resistance among IS staffs to the proliferation of PCs among the worker hoi polloi, to when there was a device called a "diskless workstation." This was basically an Intel processor and memory in a box that had no hard or floppy disk drive and it let users run their applications over the corporate network but little else. Several major vendors such as Wyse and Televideo made diskless workstations and did OK selling them, though the concept never really did catch on in a big way.

As far as IS management went, diskless workstations had some benefits. They were significantly cheaper than full-blown PCs, and they were much easier to administer. Everything was deployed centrally on a network server, and users downloaded the application code at execution time as needed. Nothing was stored locally, so viruses were nearly nonexistent. Is this starting to sound a little bit familiar?

So what was the problem? Partly, it was the fact that the PC would still work when the network went down. With diskless workstations, when the network died, work stopped.

That brings us to the second coming of the network computer, now called the "information appliance" or "enterprise appliance" (one of my favorites), or the third coming of the diskless workstation, or the fourth coming of the dumb terminal--whichever. It all seems a bit like just a costume change anyway, and along with it comes its clown-car counterpart, Web-hosted applications.

As usual in these situations, marketeers blithely point out that we're on the cusp of a "new paradigm." To me, it's more like we're now on the cusp of changing terminology yet again, getting a fresh coat of face paint and adjusting our thinking a little bit. Today, the Internet and the Web are replacing the corporate network, but much remains unchanged.

Consider the applications themselves. Microsoft's current short-term solution, which combines Windows Terminal Server with Office, has been around for a year and a half and has been criticized as slow and kludgey. A real Web-capable version of Office is due out next year, but that may just be another of Microsoft's famous bet hedges--just in case Web hosting turns out to be real.

Sun Microsystems, which already has had to relaunch its network computers for lack of customer interest, recently bought StarOffice and is readying a version called StarPortal that will run in a Web-hosted environment. Plans call for availability next year. However, when Sun bought Star Division, it touted how the existing free downloadable desktop suite, StarOffice, comes with filters so users can easily import and export MS Office files. Now it's coming out that those statements perhaps don't reflect reality. Recent news reports say there are problems with macros and programming language support, and a reviewer friend tells me StarOffice didn't come close to correctly importing any of the Word documents he tried to load. Sun promises to fix all those problems and recently announced StarOffice has surpassed a million downloads.

Corel is also getting into the act and will have its offering out next year as well. However, Corel is the same company that was going to rewrite its entire WordPerfect Office suite in Java, until it suddenly changed its mind. It also started a network computer division that it subsequently sold off. So Corel's stick-to-itiveness is a bit of an open question.

I don't want to rain on the whole parade here, because there certainly are gains to be achieved by adopting new technologies. So never say never. I'm not saying Web-hosted applications will never be a good idea, but until you have applications that run well in that environment and until high-speed connectivity becomes ubiquitous, the proponents of this latest trend may be getting ahead of themselves.

As digital transmission bandwidths soar, in fact, application hosting may become the new panacea. In describing Microsoft's foray into Web-hosted applications, company president Steve Ballmer said last month there is a certain amount of outsourcing that can be done for smaller businesses that don't have dedicated IT staff. Application administration and backup can be done cheaply over the Web instead of locally.

But what do you actually get after you've paid the price of admission and actually seen the show? Well, for one thing, there's the still the speed of access problem. Small users are less likely to have extremely fast network connections today, and that will probably be true until technologies such as digital subscriber line are truly ubiquitous, which could take another three to five years. The telecommunications carriers often market more than they can deliver, and as network demand surges beyond supply, service often becomes flaky and unreliable.

And if you are a member of the great unwashed mob that still connects at speeds of 56 Kbps or less, even if you're only downloading screen updates instead of a whole application, it still can often seem maddeningly slow, even as you repeatedly click the "refresh" button. For a quick sanity check, click on a Web page of your choice and see how long your screen takes to update, and then add the time required for executing your application on the server; it's guaranteed to be slower than a simple page update.

Then think about what would happen if everyone you work with were hitting the same server to load and execute his or her applications. Think about experiencing that delay every time you did any kind of task on your computer. Even large corporate networks may not have enough network bandwidth for all those thousands of page updates once everybody starts using Web-hosted applications.

Besides that, you're still stuck with the same old problem of how do you work when your Internet service provider, your telecommunications carrier, or your corporate network has a major hiccup?

Am I more than a little bit cynical when I see and hear glowing pronouncements touting whichever new technology craze is going to change the world? Who wouldn't be after nearly 18 years in this industry?

Just be forewarned that objects in the clown car's mirrors may be distorted and much farther away than they appear. And while you're watching the parade as the latest circus hits town, think carefully. Before you jump on that bandwagon, make sure the band is really playing your tune.

AuthorITies Archive

Send Us Your Feedback

Top of the Page


Karyl Scott: Enterprise View Karyl will explore the business and technology issues surrounding enterprise systems.	Charles Pelon: Eye On IT Charles explores IT management issues and strategies that business and technology managers face.	Jason Levitt: Internet Zone Jason focuses on the strange, egregious, and the standard technologies of the intranet/Internet.	Sean Gallagher: The Bleeding Edge From his vantage point of managing editor of InformationWeek Labs, Sean will explore the impact of new technologies on the evolving world of electronic business.