The Disappearing Desktop - It's Real This Time

[Chipp Walters]

Hi Dan,

You of course know, I'm with Richard and Andre on this. Perhaps even 
further left of them. My experience with Application Service Providers 
tell me it's very difficult to persuade the enterprise to take advantage 
of such technologies, especially from outside the firewall. And if 
Enterprise doesn't adopt the technology, then I don't give it much of a 
chance.

Frankly, I still think AJAX is the flavor of the month in California, 
where flavors of the month are mostly born. I believe this for many of 
the reasons already stated.

But,here's another reason:

18 months ago I spent some time with the CTO of Quest communications in 
Dallas. I was surprised to see his computer running WinNT when both Win 
2000 and Win XP were available. His comment was something along the 
lines of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.' He understands, it is 
important to keep up to date, but he mentioned being responsible for 
something like 2000 computers. Factoring in costs like downtime, 
retraining, and licensing fees brought him to the decision that the 
gains just weren't worth the effort. I think many CTO's are now more 
budget-minded and I'm sure BOD's are wary of out-of-control technology 
budgets, especially when it's obvious the productivity gains just are 
not showing themselves.

Speaking of productivity, I'm not so sure, deep mask interfaces with 
glowing pulsing buttons and expose like task management really helps 
users 'get more done'.

You and I and most everyone on this list know of good...no GREAT 
software we have used in the past, which is no longer available..but our 
fonts are now anti-aliased!

Programs like Claris Impact, Claris CAD, MORE, the old versions of Flash 
which were easy to script, MacWrite, MacPaint and MacDraw. Some of these 
STILL have no equal (imo, mostly thanks to the illegal efforts of MS). 
That's where one finds productivity gains, in the software and what it 
can do, not in whether it runs in a browser or on the desktop.

Good discussion,

best,

Chipp