Web Things, by Mark Baker

This report about Google’s brand power reminds me of a discussion I had with a guy from Adobe at ETech who was pushing Apollo. I was trying to figure out why somebody would want to use it, and this guy’s response was “One word; branding”. Of course, he trotted out the expected example of Apple and iTunes and said that iTunes was more immersive and therefore provided Apple superior branding. Ok, fair enough. But obviously, as this report shows, Google didn’t require a fat client in order to build one of the world’s strongest brands.

Adobe’s ability to execute has been impressive, of course. But I can’t help but wonder if they wouldn’t be doing so much better had they simply innovated on top of the Web. I suppose that’s the easy way out, but it’s not nearly the most lucrative.

Dave Orchard on versioning;

The fundamental problem with a version # in a document is that it doesn’t provide for a given document to be valid under more than one version. What we really need is to be able to indicate a “space of versions” that a given document is valid under, whether that’s a list or regexp or whatever.

Amen. You know, just like a media type!

A quaint exchange on the WebAPI WG mailing list;

>> Why not always uppercase method?
>
> That would upset the HTTP gods.

Ok. Fair enough.

I see that my work there is complete. 8-)

I’m very happy your baby is 42 weeks old, and that you’ve chosen pampers for it, and that you like recipe collecting. But please note that mbaker@gmail.com is not your email address. Thank you.