The Disappearing Desktop - It's Real This Time

[Dan Shafer]

The fact that one such effort failed -- or even that a bunch of such  
efforts failed -- is irrelevant in the face of the new market  
realities. Particularly the ad supported software model is one that I  
think has a tremendous amount of potential to be disruptive.

Some people may well want to continue to pay premium prices for  
software so that they can keep their data on their local drives, but:  
(a) those people will eventually have to give way to the market  
forces if for no other reason than that all the software publishers  
head over there; and (b) there really needn't be a connection between  
where the software is and where the data is unless the user wants  
such a connection.

The success of products like Hotmail and GMail (among others) paves  
the way for this new reality. I know there are a lot of folks who  
think I'm all wet here. It's OK. I'm sticking with my analysis.

Dan

On Nov 9, 2005, at 4:00 PM, Brian Maher wrote:

> Dan,
>
> The company I work for tried this model (application service  
> provider .. i.e. you rent the software) and it did not work well at  
> all.  The simple fact is that people will always want to "own" both  
> their data and the app that manipulates it.  Will some people use  
> this?  Yes.  Will most use it?  No.
>
> Personally, I see the world eventually moving to more desktop apps  
> which use the internet (specifically http/htttps) as a transport  
> protocol for data (think desktop app that talks http/htttps to  
> apache which in turn invokes the requested cgi/servlet to process  
> the sent data and send back a response).
>
> Brian
>
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