The death of the desktop
It is not news that nearly every application is browser based (notable exceptions are high power games, and desktop apps like word). Another trend is that browser applications are becoming more highly functioning. When preparing content for the web most people use a combination of google doc and wordpress.
Printing a document is becoming seen as socially unacceptable and is more often than not more inconvenient than reading on the screen.
Do these different forces spell the end for MS Word?
and if word dies will the rest of the desktop software also die?
2 Responses to “The death of the desktop”
Francis Cook
I think this is off the mark.
People have tried making everything into webapps and it hasn’t worked. I’m expecting a migration back to the desktop. It’s simply not practical to expect everything to work through a web front end, and it is that drive to try an make everything “fit” in that space that has given us so many attempts at making the desktop a webpage.
If everything was to become a webapp, why did Apple bother with a SDK for the iPhone ? Why is there still a great and growing developer community who build local desktop applications ?
Word will stay simply because there is too much investment and no real alternative (OpenOffice could be, but frankly isn’t and will not be until they hire someone to fix their UI).
The desktop is cheap, and the network may become quite expensive soon.
simon
I aggree with you on every point … except the one about word.
Im sorry but its a gonner.
Google doc, wordpress, wiki’s and other online mechanisms will replace it,
word is the tool of the “give me print out” generation, its UI is designed arround making a good printed output.
However it was never as good as the adobe suit of products at print and it is not a great tool for creating content for the web … It simply has no place in the future (unless Microsoft do somthing clever)
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