So, the Hard-disk on my http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/SAP_AG_%28SAP%29SAP laptop died. For the third time in 6 months. I have a small suspicionthat the Good Ole’ T42 is about to reach the big scrapyard in the sky,but with the current offerings from our IT department, I’ll stick to my IBM workhorse as long as I can. The one on my personal desktop died a weekago, so I’m finding myself re-installing two machines at the same time.
Re-installing all the different software which I need for my daily work (full list below), I found myself asking – Why do I bother? Why don’t Ihave everything browser based, or VM based. My laptop dies? Who care. Its just hardware. I hear this sentiment more and more reflected whenspeaking to customers. One of them just told me this week: “Product xxx shouldgo to the browser. Why do we need a desktop? why should we incur the cost of supporting a desktop (following the Vista fiasco)?. Our roadmap is inclined towards browser only, looking into virtualization (esp.with HTML 5 coming out). We don’t believe in RIA – the plug-in conceptvs. the HTML5 vision”.
I do believe in RIA, but I see the point. As HTML gets better andbetter (See how Firefox 3.5 handles Video) and the desktop OS’s notbecoming any more stable (yeah, yeah,Apple and Linux fan boys), I am trying more and more to keep my informationat the cloud. Instead of backing up to an external hard-drive, I’musing Mozy. Instead of jotting things to little notebooks, I’m using Evernote. Remember The Milk. Slowly but surely – I’m going to the cloud. And if this is happening for my personal productivity, what willthis mean to Enterprise software? Can we break down the monolith Enterprise apps to small pieces/services which run somewhere else? Moreto come.
(The full list can be found in my peronal blog - http://www.enterprise-ui.com/2009/09/24/desktop-why/)
