Desk-toppled
Thursday, March 13th, 2008Microsoft has dominated the computer market comfortably for the last two decades with their unrivalled operating system and office software. Microsoft didn’t see Web 2.0 coming and could ultimately pay the price in the future as the desktop’s usage is reduced in favour of more accessible, cheaper and newer Web 2.0 alternatives. I was reading a short article in the latest edition of Wired magazine and it inspired me to bring up this debate, which chiefly hypothesises that ‘service software’ available online will eventually override the need for owning expensive software in a world where it is possible to connect to the Internet from any computer, in or out of the office.
Let’s take Internet giant Google for example. It has recently developed a collection of online applications including a suite of personal productivity tools that rival Microsoft Office. It also provides users with 10GB of data storage – surely no less than most businessmen require to store Office data on their laptops. There are always security concerns however; data on your laptop is there with you at all times, whereas live data in an online environment is at risk from a fraudster or highly skilled hacker. Using a program in a web browser, while perhaps not having the same depth as their desktop counterparts and despite the possibility of asking users to depart from programs with which they have become familiar over the years, provide the benefits to cost-cutting, space-saving and modernising the industry. As more users begin to place more demand on this type of technology, we’ll only see the quality of service improve over the years. It’s also all about what the user’s want - these services are here to benefit the Internet user and so with the current trend in Web 2.0 applications, it will be the users who help make the software.
It’s not just limited to office software either. Why spend hundreds of pounds on shrink-wrapped boxes of the (then) latest software, when it’s possible to watch videos, read encyclopaedias, store & edit photos, keep a diary, update a calendar and keep your accounts in a free web browser?
My personal opinion is that there will always be room for desktop application software, but it needs to keep up with the times. Companies should make their products cheaper for a start. Paying £300 for Photoshop is outrageous enough without having decent free alternatives available to use online or download. Make the desktop versions even better – more intuitive, greater depth but not at the expense of simplicity, online-enabled for extensions and easier transferability. Web 2.0 applications software will become even better and I think it’s inevitable that the desktop software will suffer at the unstoppable hands of the web’s growth. When word gets round to more and more people worldwide, it will soon catch on and its usefulness will be beyond containment. I wrote this whole essay using Google’s ‘Docs & Spreadsheets’ program and had to put it into Word to check grammar, spelling and font formatting. Perhaps it’s not quite ready…
By Adam Moss
Reference:
(2007) ‘The Wired 40’ Wired April: 121
2 Responses to “Desk-toppled”
By D Sharma on Apr 9, 2008
Quite right Adam. While desktop applications would continue to be there, the question is what would change in them. For one I feel there would be more applications based on Adobe’s AIR framework.
Then the cost of these desktop applications would scale down.
By Adam on Apr 9, 2008