"What AJAX has brought to the world," says Mitchell Kertzman (pictured), longtime venture capitalist with Hummer Winblad but still inevitably known as the founder of PowerSoft and subsequent chairman and CEO of Sybase, "is a hint that we can have both a browser client AND a rich UI."

"Just like client/server, where the UI advances started in the consumer world and then worked their way into IT," continues Kertzman, "we're seeing the same thing happen with rich client technologies today."

He continues:

"As recently as a year ago, IT executives were almost completely uninterested in improving the UI, but end users are demanding (once again) that they be able to get the same UI in their enterprise applications that theyre experiencing in their personal world."

Kertzman was of course part of the client/server rich client business with PowerBuilder in the late 80s to mid-90s. "When the world moved to browser-based clients," he explains, "I always felt that we stepped back to 3270 days with forms mode clients. (You remember them, don't you? You fill in all the blanks, hit enter and get all your errors back, fix them, hit enter, repeat until your entry is accepted.)"

"I expected that users would rebel against this huge step backward, but the universality of browser clients trumped the rich interface."