The desktop OS will still matter, just not which one

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The fundamental problem with web based apps...

...is that they're only useful as long as internet connection could be maintained.

Today at work (a national office supply chain), our internet/intranet connection went down. Debit transactions didn't work at all, Credit card transactions required phone authorization, our phone system which calls between locations (which uses VoIP) was fritzing out all day, we couldn't check for inventory, and we couldn't place orders for products we didn't have in stock.
All of that, and all the machines in the store run windows XP, and our Point of Sale software, web browsers, and inventory management software all run locally. What would happen if our POS software ran in a web browser? What if our inventory client was written in AJAX? We were limping today, we'd be crushed if we were any more dependent on our internet connection.

I think that the best way to handle it would be to use web apps for information dependent on the web anyway. For example, yahoo's AJAX interface is a great example because if my pipe was down, I couldn't get to my e-mail on a locally installed app anyway. On the other hand, I would feel foolish depending on a web app like Google Docs to type up my term paper, then have to tell my professor that I couldn't access my paper because my internet connection was down and I couldn't get to it.

Hard drive space is getting dirt cheap (less than $200 for a 1/2 terabyte drive) and we're working on moving data to the web?!? Is it THAT bad to have a locally installed spreadsheet or word processor? I could understand a PLATFORM INDEPENDENT app, i.e. a word processor written in Java, or something like AbiWord that has a version for every platform, as a way to get around the windows requirement for Office, for example. But having to wait for the app to load over the internet, taking time and bandwidth every time I access it, and at that only when it's up.

The clincher is that I simply don't understand the benefit for this! I can understand the desire to write a program that works anywhere, but at this point, there's an app for every platform that users probably know how to use already. Windows has office, Mac has Office and iWork, and Linux has OpenOffice. If it ain't broke, why fix it?


Joey

Posted by: voyager529   Posted on: 07/23/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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