Earlier today I wrote about my personal experience of moving away from my desktop-OS-centric web 1.0 world to a more collaborative online-centric web 2.0 world. In light of Google’s recent acquisition of JotSpot and the news that Scrybe, the hot new online/offline communication suite, went into beta today; it made my [long] post seem more appropriate. After publishing it, I was reading through my RSS feeds using my new Google Reader and to my surprise I found three other posts written by people I often read covering the same subject!?
First there was Richard McManus from Read/Write Web who had just published a post called “Elephants and Evolution – How the Landscape is Changing for Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Adobe” which is even longer than my post on the same subject and he concludes:
“The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps. Both Microsoft and Google are racing toward a happy medium. However, they aren’t the only players in town, not by a long shot. Both Mozilla and Adobe are well positioned to take advantage of desktop and web convergence.”
Then I came across Ryan Carson’s post “Our office 2.0 Experiment” which explains “the story of their recent attempt at Carson Systems to move from proprietary desktop-based software to various web-based and open source solutions.”
“By choosing this suite of office tools, I believe we’ve made big savings in tech support costs and time management. However, it was definitely painful in the beginning when we made the switch-over. Ideally, I’d like to use web apps for all of our needs, but it’s just not feasible until wifi becomes ubiquitous. I believe this will happen very soon, so it’s only a matter of time. However, until then, we’ll have to live with this hotchpotch of apps.”
Finally Hugh McLead from GapingVoid summed up in a picture what I have been trying to say in a thousand words. “Microsoft change the world or go home”. Enough said …