BACK TO THE WALL

Dick Pountain/15 July 2000 12:16/Idealog 72

I'm starting to feel rather like one of those Montana survivalists - you know, the ones who build a log cabin (with their bare hands) on top of a hill in the virgin forest and then fill it up with baked beans, cans of petrol and shotgun shells, against the day when the United Nations/Communist Conspiracy comes to get them in the Black Helicopter. My paranaoia is less visceral, more virtual in nature, namely that 'they' are trying to take my computer and my data away from me. I'm afraid that's the only emotion that this new craze for Application Service Providers inspires in me, though it seems to fill many others with enthusiasm (including some in these very pages, from whom I beg to disagree in a polite and professional manner).

I make no bones about being one of the very old guard of personal computing, whose slogan remains to this day 'one person, one (or more) processors'. To me the personal computer revolution that began around 1979 was all about putting computing power into our hands to do what we wanted with, whether that meant writing or drawing, scanning mucky pictures or playing games. The reason I was so enthusiastic for many years about object-oriented programming was because it held out the best hope of taming the complexity of computing and empowering more people to make their computers do what they wanted them to. Old style procedural programming was far too difficult and black an art for more than a tiny minority of people ever to master (or even to want to) but I saw in properly designed object systems a way out of that. The signs were promising for a while, as Visual Basic and the first rash of VBXs demonstrated the principle, and one or two brilliant applications (like the CleanSheet spreadsheet) showed how much further you could take it: a kit of visual parts, like Lego on the screen, that you could drag around and connect up by drawing lines and then the 'picture' you'd made just worked.

It was networking, and in particular the Internet, that did for this vision. There's no intrinsic reason why networking has to be so god-awfully hard and unreliable, indeed no intrinsic reason why - like domestic plumbing - it should not be hidden away behind the skirting-board, since no-one but a plumber is interested in its details. It should not be beyond the wit of people who could design a Pentium III or a GSM phone to design a PC operating system that handles remote drives exactly like local drives, autoconfiguring itself transparently by negotiating a protocol that both sides can understand. It was not to be. Commercial wars between network kit makers, the vested interests of highly-paid consultants, and the truly dim imaginations at Microsoft have all conspired to keep networking a ferociously black art. Then, worse still, the rise of the World Wide Web turned it into a hobby and suddenly there are millions out there who actually want to know how TCP/IP works, in detail, and like to talk about it with other consenting adults.

The consequences have been devastating. First came the famous U-turn where Microsoft tore up its allegiance to a fully component-oriented operating system and started running after the Internet bandwagon. Then it felt obliged to splice client/server and email capabilities onto everything in sight, and to build everything else out of HTML (which was designed for quite different purposes). This has been a major cause of the bloat and overcomplication of Windows and its applications since 95 - all the serious crashes I've experienced recently figured a TCP/IP stack lurking somewhere in the background. Now we have arrived at a place where PCs have literally become unmanageable, and people are so desparate to escape the nightmare that installing new software has become that they are prepared to give it up and let someone else - an ASP - do it for them. Who can really blame them? The only problem is that you can rarely trust other people to take the same care as you would with your really valuable possessions.

Sometimes you have to of course. Lacking a pilot's licence I'm  happy enough to let someone else fly the 747 that takes me across the Atlantic, but then I do know that those guys are trained, licenced and regulated to hell and back. On the other hand, imagine a curious world in which the only writing implements allowed were kept in public libraries. In this world, if you wanted to write a novel you'd have to go to the library and work there using a pencil on a chain, and at night you'd be forced to leave your novel behind in the librarian's desk. That's pretty much what you are doing when you entrust all your data to an ASP. They might be very well trained and diligent (like the guys at Three Mile Island) or they might be a bunch of pissheads. They might be very friendly and helpful, unless you fall out with them over a disputed bill. They might go bankrupt, or fall out with their own supplier of server-farm space. In short you've lost control over your own data processing needs, the very thing that the personal computer revolution once seemed to offer. As for me, I'll be up in the attic with my ThinkPad, my new portable CD-RW drive and a shotgun...