Name It and Claim It
Matt Haughey posted a comment today chastising the “geeks” who have been resisting Adaptive Path’s “Ajax” label for new wave web applications that use XMLHttpRequest, Javascript, and the DOM together. He chalks their resistance up to the typical engineer’s distrust of marketeers, and urges them to jump on the bandwagon in order to more effectively extract money from non-programmer VCs, managers, and so forth.
I would argue that Haughey is missing the real source of their consternation, though: I think there’s a feeling, perhaps, that in publishing their white paper and coining their own name, the hipster consultants at Adaptive Path are laying claim to, or at least hitching themselves to, someone else’s revolution. If anyone deserves credit for legitimizing and popularizing the use of XMLHttpRequest, after all, it must be the hardcore coders at Google (and the team behind Gmail specifically), and yet by coining a marketing label, AP will probably become the go-to guys for journalists, executives, VCs, and other non-techies seeking to understand the technologies behind Web 2.0. The tendency in the geek world, where “cred” is very important, is to think of this behavior as something akin to the “sidler” on Seinfeld–the guy who does little of the work himself, but always seems to be standing conveniently next to Elaine whenever kudos are being handed out.
Haughey is right, though: we need a succinct way of referring to this architectural style, and Ajax is as good as any. And let’s face it, if we’re really concerned about who deserves the proper credit for Ajax (or at least the XMLHttpRequest part of it), we’d have to give Microsoft Internet Explorer mad props. Let’s see how the web geeks respond to that one!
(Update: Due to the potentially incendiary nature of this post, I wish to point out that I have no ill will toward Adaptive Path. I think they’re smart people, and Jeff Veen has been one of my heros since I read his books in college. I’m merely explaining what I think Matt Haughey is missing about geek psychology, and this probably would have merely been a comment on his weblog if he allowed them.)
April 18th, 2005 at 11:42 am
I could not agree with you more. Doubt that was Adaptive Path intention, but it certainly could be misconstrued that they wanted to take credit for it.
April 18th, 2005 at 1:57 pm
I think you’ve misread the situation. Adaptive Path doesn’t have a single coder on staff. If they become the go to guys, they’ll likely funnel whatever VC, press, and programming requests to more likely candidates.
I don’t think AP wanted to steal the phrase and make it their own, they simply wanted to help people describe it. I don’t see anything selfish in what they did, they simply floated a phrase out there, aimed at the general populace instead of coders doing the grunt work. My point earlier today is that while folks argue about the exact nature of the term, they could be instead making money for themselves.
I’m happy to see ajax concepts finally get some legs because as I noted in earlier posts on my site, I worked on ajax stuff four years ago. It was amazing then and I thought it would revolutionize web apps overnight, but that never happened. It finally seems to be happening now, and I’m just happy we’re finally getting better applications. Maybe coining the term ajax was part of that, maybe not, but at least users are getting real email, mapping, and photography services on the web now.
April 18th, 2005 at 2:11 pm
Matt,
Thanks for clarifying that–I guess I wasn’t aware that Adaptive Path didn’t do any development themselves.
Honestly, my thinking about the whole “Ajax” thing has vacillated between thinking it was a publicity grab and looking at it as merely a reasonable attempt at coming up with a better name than “XMLHttpRequest+Javascript+DOM” or whatever. I guess this post kind of reflects that ambivalence. As I said, though, I do have a lot of respect for the Adaptive Path people, so I’m sure you’re right that it was the latter rather than the former.