Life is grand

If I ever said the desktop is dead, I apologise. It is an unfortunate choice of words and never adequately described the changing shape of software.

The desktop as we know it is dying.

This Business Week article argues that the desktop isn’t dead and then goes on to list a series of desktop applications which are nothing like the past generation of desktop applications. They are written using web technologies by web developers and rely heavily on web services. Web, web, web. To say that the eBay AIR application is proof the desktop application is not dead fails to realise that AIR is a browser much like Firefox and Internet Explorer. Take away the address bar, remove the browser chrome, stick in Google Gears or Dojo Offline and you have a functionally similar environment to AIR.

3 hour installs are going to become increasingly rare. Disconnected, isolated applications are becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Applications will work on your desktop and on the internet cafe computer through a browser, and on your hand-held device. And your data will live out there, intelligently syncing and following you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.