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VC dollars return to the desktop
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03/30/2006, By Om Malik
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Microsoft used to cast such a pall over startups that venture capitalists would ask them the "M question" -- how does the company plan to coexist with Microsoft (Research)? And if the answer was that the startup planned to compete with the software giant, then VCs wouldn't invest.
The new wave of investment is driven by the convergence of three major trends. First, broadband is spreading everywhere. Second, open-source programming tools are widely available and improving in quality. And third, technologies are emerging that make Web-based software as graphical and interactive as desktop applications, like Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Adobe's Flash.
Ajax uses JavaScript, a popular programming language for writing interactive Web pages, to gather small bits of data quickly in XML, a common data format. The result is that Web pages can change dynamically without having to go through a slow reloading process. The best-known example is Google (Research) Maps, which lets users scroll and zoom through a map. (Earlier Web-based map services required a page reload every time the user changed the view.)
Those are hardly numbers to make Bill Gates quake in his boots, of course, since Windows has hundreds of millions of users around the world. But it's notable that entrepreneurs are even able to raise money for such products. Finally, the Web has technologies for interactive software that match the capabilities of the desktop -- now the field is wide open for anyone with an idea.
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