Ajax Girl

Richard MacManus linked to a Gizbuzz interview of Jen Mazzon and Sam Schillace of the Google Docs and Spreadsheets team (both ex-Writely).

Nothing ground-breaking, but it is interesting to hear about their thoughts on Ajax:

Browser compatibility issues - like the early graphic Web

Next was a question about browser compatibility issues and how that affects D&S - and indeed the future of rich web applications. Sam responded that “it is definitely an issue […] these apps are all cutting edge - it kind of reminds me of the early days of the graphical web, when you couldn’t count on the browsers to render tables correctly […]”.

But he thinks it’s “just growing pains” and it’ll take about a year to sort those issues out.

Also on the question of whether Ajax is better than Flash and Laszlo etc, Sam thinks that Ajax is currently more web native.

It’s about being Web native, not cloning desktop apps

Later in the interview, Jen stresses that they’re “not trying to clone desktop apps”. They want to be familiar to people, “but we’re trying to do something that’s actually more native to the Internet, more usable on the Internet.”

Sam says they’ve had a lot of feedback that people like the fact they’re not trying to copy desktop apps. He said “copying the existing stuff just feels irrelevant to us - we’re not trying to copy, we’re trying to re-invent.”

Both Jen and Sam re-affirmed that collaboration and sharing is their main focus with D&S, as well as being web native - rather than trying to compete on features with desktop apps.

If you were asked “why is Ajax a better fit for some apps than Flash?” what would you say? Do you agree? Does the open web matter? What if Adobe fully opened up their format?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-docs-and-spreadsheets-team-web-native-matters