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Bring Your Own Client

geoffreylitt.com

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Re: Bring Your Own Client

#161

Post by polote »

stupidcar wrote: post #11

The competitive advantages of owning both the application and the data are so high that don't see widespread BYOC ever happening without government intervention. I'd like to see an enforced separation in law between commercial application providers and storage providers. So, if someone writes an app like Google Docs, they can't just store the data opaquely on their own cloud servers. They legally have to integrate wi…

> The competitive advantages of owning both the application and the data are so high

Honestly this is wrong. Google drive has API for everything, Notion is working on an API, Confluence has API for everything, Trello ... Any serious text editor (and all the ones wrongly cited in the article) software has API for everything. Want to export your Confluence data to Notion ? you can. In the documentation tools space owning the data is not something looked for, because company pay for the service so the data belong to them

BYOC can exists today, the only reason it doesn't. Is that the documents format is super complex and require complex editors. But the format themselves are not secret, the application is (and not even always, for example the Confluence editor is open source).

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#162

Post by TeMPOraL »

ivan888 wrote: post #135
api wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For something to get traction, it has to have excellent UI and UX. So far open source hasn't been very successful at providing that since there is no economic model to finance the immense amount of work required for good UX.

I posited a similar point to a former colleague (mine was more about eventual market dominance due to excellent UI+UX), and he came back with Craigslist as a perfect example of a product that gained a massive user base well into an era where its UI felt very outdated. A few years after this exchange, I feel more like I was right about my point: FB Marketplace has almost completely taken over as far as a classified pr…

I think the problem with this analysis of Craigslist vs. Facebook is twofold. One, Craigslist had, in fact, a great UI. It was simple, clean and accessible to everyone, no matter whether you were using the newest desktop browser, a screen reader, a cheap phone or a potato. Craigslist is a success story of bullshit-free UI.

It got beaten by FB Marketplace because Facebook has almost three billion captive users, and a marketplace bundled in the service they use many times a month takes less effort to visit than a completely separate site.

From this, and many other cases - like e.g. everyone hating the IM/videoconference system they use and yet using them anyway, I conclude two rules of thumb:

- UI that's good for users has very little to do with what UI/UX specialists peddle today;

- Network effects trump UIs - a sticky service with bad UI will beat a competitor that offers much better UI, but doesn't hold the user captive.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#163

Post by Lammy »

nvrspyx wrote: post #127
api wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For something to get traction, it has to have excellent UI and UX. So far open source hasn't been very successful at providing that since there is no economic model to finance the immense amount of work required for good UX.

That view seems a little shoehorned because the parent comment specified "protocol", implying that it would be the connection between client and storage, thus not user-facing. Regardless, * Blender * Godot * Krita * GitLab * Olive * Firefox * Thunderbird * NextCloud * Amarok * Vital * and more The problem isn't an "economic model". The problem is that most open-source projects simply don't attract UI designers, UX re…

This view is the one that feels shoehorned. "Normies" (not pejorative) have no idea what a protocol is. They just want something that works and is convenient as possible. That's how we ended up at the $free+$surveillance App Store / modern Web model.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#165

Post by carapace »

asim wrote: post #14

We had standardisation at the protocol level for the internet which let us build services on top, but now we're looking for the same at the app level. HTTP was meant for web pages, we never created anything for Apps and Services. What that new standard is going to look like, I have no idea, gRPC does well to define the APIs and so we use it across dozens of services here https://github.com/micro/services . Curious to…

FWIW, my $0.02: I think this problem has been noticed and solved over and over again. If you squint a little stuff like CORBA are in the same stew pot, eh?

There's relatively recent work on collaborative editing and CRDTs, but as it says in the Wikipedia entry:

> The first instance of a collaborative real-time editor was demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart in 1968, in The Mother of All Demos. Widely available implementations of the concept took decades to appear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_real-time_editor...

There are a lot of these protocol/API tools like gRPC, Thrift, Swagger/OpenAPI, or even good old ASN.1, eh?

To me the question is how to drive convergence? How to alleviate https://xkcd.com/927/ ? (The "Standards" comic.) Who shall forge the "one true ring to bind them"?

- - - -

Also, I think Data Model catalogs (like "Data Model Patterns: A Metadata Map" by David C. Hay) should be part of the answer. Instead of rolling your own data models you should be able to just pull models from a standard catalog.

- - - -

In sum, if we're lucky, we'll start to get convergence in the protocol and model space. Anything that isn't working towards convergence is just adding another log to the burning pile of standards, eh?

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#166

Post by mandliya »

I admire the thought here however as author himself pointed out this is an innovation killer in some way. I think then we need to separate what can be shipped with universal BYOC and what can’t. Any new innovation is build up on existing features. Extending it to heterogeneous clients will be neither cost effective nor innovation friendly. I work for MS office and shipping the same feature on online client vs win32 apps takes 1-2 quarter and sometime whole rewrite.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#168

Post by draw_down »

polote wrote: post #161
stupidcar wrote: post #11

The competitive advantages of owning both the application and the data are so high that don't see widespread BYOC ever happening without government intervention. I'd like to see an enforced separation in law between commercial application providers and storage providers. So, if someone writes an app like Google Docs, they can't just store the data opaquely on their own cloud servers. They legally have to integrate wi…

> The competitive advantages of owning both the application and the data are so high Honestly this is wrong. Google drive has API for everything, Notion is working on an API, Confluence has API for everything, Trello ... Any serious text editor (and all the ones wrongly cited in the article) software has API for everything. Want to export your Confluence data to Notion ? you can. In the documentation tools space owni…

Look at what happened with Twitter and its third party clients. GP is correct.

(I'm not saying it's good and I like it, I'm saying it makes sense)

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#169

Post by TeMPOraL »

Aeolun wrote: post #64
okl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or SQLite, which I would recommend over some homebrewed text file format, see https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html

Unless you like your database to take types as a little more than suggestions.

We're talking about SQLite instead of text files, not instead of RMDBS. Plaintext files don't even have the concept of a type, they're just unstructured blob with a well-known mapping to printable characters. SQLite is a step up, because it lets you express structure and hint at the desired interpretation.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#170

Post by nvrspyx »

Lammy wrote: post #163
nvrspyx wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That view seems a little shoehorned because the parent comment specified "protocol", implying that it would be the connection between client and storage, thus not user-facing. Regardless, * Blender * Godot * Krita * GitLab * Olive * Firefox * Thunderbird * NextCloud * Amarok * Vital * and more The problem isn't an "economic model". The problem is that most open-source projects simply don't attract UI designers, UX re…

This view is the one that feels shoehorned. "Normies" (not pejorative) have no idea what a protocol is. They just want something that works and is convenient as possible. That's how we ended up at the $free+$surveillance App Store / modern Web model.

Since when was HN a normie site?
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