the trouble with the second stage was that there were no clear ui standards… the programmers almost had too much flexibility, so everybody did things in different ways, which made it hard, if you knew how to use program x, to also use program y. wordperfect and lotus 1-2-3 had completely different menu systems, keyboard interfaces, and command structures. and copying data between them was out of the question.

and that’s exactly where we are with ajax development today. sure, yeah, the usability is much better than the first generation dos apps, because we’ve learned some things since then. but ajax apps can be inconsistent, and have a lot of trouble working together — you can’t really cut and paste objects from one ajax app to another, for example, so i’m not sure how you get a picture from gmail to flickr. come on guys, cut and paste was invented 25 years ago.

the third phase with pcs was macintosh and windows. a standard, consistent user interface with features like multiple windows and the clipboard designed so that applications could work together. the increased usability and power we got out of the new guis made personal computing explode.

so if history repeats itself, we can expect some standardization of ajax user interfaces to happen in the same way we got microsoft windows. somebody is going to write a compelling sdk that you can use to make powerful ajax applications with common user interface elements that work together. and whichever sdk wins the most developer mindshare will have the same kind of competitive stronghold as microsoft had with their windows api.

if you’re a web app developer, and you don’t want to support the sdk everybody else is supporting, you’ll increasingly find that people won’t use your web app, because it doesn’t, you know, cut and paste and support address book synchronization and whatever weird new interop features we’ll want in 2010.

imagine, for example, that you’re google with gmail, and you’re feeling rather smug. but then somebody you’ve never heard of, some bratty y combinator startup, maybe, is gaining ridiculous traction selling newsdk, which combines a great portable programming language that compiles to javascript, and even better, a huge ajaxy library that includes all kinds of clever interop features. not just cut ‘n’ paste: cool mashup features like synchronization and single-point identity management (so you don’t have to tell facebook and twitter what you’re doing, you can just enter it in one place). and you laugh at them, for their newsdk is a honking 232 megabytes … 232 megabytes! … of javascript, and it takes 76 seconds to load a page. and your app, gmail, doesn’t lose any customers.

but then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled javascript. and suddenly newsdk is really fast. and paul graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things.

and your programmers are like, jeez louise, gmail is huge, we can’t port gmail to this stupid newsdk. we’d have to change every line of code. heck it’d be a complete rewrite; the whole programming model is upside down and recursive and the portable programming language has more parentheses than even google can buy. the last line of almost every function consists of a string of 3,296 right parentheses. you have to buy a special editor to count them.

and the newsdk people ship a pretty decent word processor and a pretty decent email app and a killer facebook/twitter event publisher that synchronizes with everything, so people start using it.

and while you’re not paying attention, everybody starts writing newsdk apps, and they’re really good, and suddenly businesses only want newsdk apps, and all those old-school plain ajax apps look pathetic and won’t cut and paste and mash and sync and play drums nicely with one another. and gmail becomes a legacy. the wordperfect of email. and you’ll tell your children how excited you were to get 2gb to store email, and they’ll laugh at you. their nail polish has more than 2gb.

crazy story? substitute “google gmail” with “lotus 1-2-3”. the newsdk will be the second coming of microsoft windows; this is exactly how lotus lost control of the spreadsheet market. and it’s going to happen again on the web because all the same dynamics and forces are in place. the only thing we don’t know yet are the particulars, but it’ll happen.