ASAP: The "Breeze Killer"?
Jeremy Allaire thinks he's found a “Breeze Killer.” The app, ASAP by Convoq (which Jeremy just happens to be an investor in and board member of), is actually pretty cool. Integrated video, voice, IM, presentation sharing, etc. He says that it makes “first generation products” like Placeware and WebEx feel awkward, but I have to disagree. Although this is a very cool application, it suffers from the same design flaw that Lazslo does, it is built on top of Flash. This means that, although the UI is very slick, it is extremely unresponsive compared to a standard desktop app, and it sucks up your CPU cycles like mad. Just try doing some screen sharing and you will notice that not only does your CPU utilization go through the roof, but the video is like 8 seconds off, even on DSL.
Another issue raised is security, which is quite an interesting topic. Flash doesn't have a nice CryptoAPI like Windows, so it would be interesting to see how they are handling this. Due to the slow speed of actionscript, you can't exactly secure large amounts of data with it either (imagine implementing SSL in javascript... it is slow enough when it is written in a compiled language), so unless you are going to do strictly HTTPS transfers for all data, you are out of luck (maybe that explains the slowness and high CPU usage?).
In any case, nice try, but I think I'll stick with Placeware and Windows Messenger. Maybe this app is a Breeze Killer, but then again, no one uses Breeze, so lets try killing some of the big guys instead.