Monday, August 29, 2005
Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment: "Google's Windows-only world
Jason Kottke's intriguing review of the current status of the Web-as-platform question (are Web apps now good enough to threaten the primacy of a certain desktop operating system monopoly? will they ever be?) is only the latest in a long line of musings on this theme that stretch all the way back to Netscape's heyday. The dream of rendering individual users' choice of desktop operating system irrelevant by getting them to move all their significant work into the browser was what fueled all those death-march development cycles during the browser wars.
Microsoft cut off Netscape's air supply -- with plenty of help from its victim's own asphyxiating mistakes -- before the browser company could complete building all the parts of this new computing world. Java was supposed to be an alternate road to the same destination; it turned out to be good for some other things, but not for that.
So we lost a few years there.
More recently, the Web-app universe has come roaring back, as GMail, GoogleMaps, Flickr and other Ajax-based Web interfaces have provided users with something speedier and more interesting than the old, slow, click-and-wait world of Web computing. It is possible, today, to begin moving more and more of one's work and data into browser-accessible stores and programs. This is all great, and it's unfolding with a kind of inevitability..."
Jason Kottke's intriguing review of the current status of the Web-as-platform question (are Web apps now good enough to threaten the primacy of a certain desktop operating system monopoly? will they ever be?) is only the latest in a long line of musings on this theme that stretch all the way back to Netscape's heyday. The dream of rendering individual users' choice of desktop operating system irrelevant by getting them to move all their significant work into the browser was what fueled all those death-march development cycles during the browser wars.
Microsoft cut off Netscape's air supply -- with plenty of help from its victim's own asphyxiating mistakes -- before the browser company could complete building all the parts of this new computing world. Java was supposed to be an alternate road to the same destination; it turned out to be good for some other things, but not for that.
So we lost a few years there.
More recently, the Web-app universe has come roaring back, as GMail, GoogleMaps, Flickr and other Ajax-based Web interfaces have provided users with something speedier and more interesting than the old, slow, click-and-wait world of Web computing. It is possible, today, to begin moving more and more of one's work and data into browser-accessible stores and programs. This is all great, and it's unfolding with a kind of inevitability..."
Comments:
Post a Comment
