The Death of the Desktop: Not-So-Greatly Exaggerated. In Fact, Not Exaggerated At All.
In a post somewhat related to my “the desktop metaphor is dead” diatribes, my favorite open-source pinko commie has written about how and why the desktop OS is inching its way to irrelevance.
I think I agree. Google and a few other web-based productivity tool vendor are either furiously working on or already releasing beta versions of their software that allow the user to work in offline mode.
The day is coming when you will start your computer thusly:
- You turn on your machine.
- A very lightweight OS is loaded; it could be GNU/Linux, Open BSD, whatevah. It doesn’t even necessarily have to have a significant amount of GUI itself; it only needs to be able to display a browser via a GUI.
- The OS loads a TCP/IP communications stack, device drivers, and searches for a (wired or wireless) connection, authenticating itself as appropriate.
- An (open-source of course) browser opens, and presents some or all of the projects, documents, spreadsheets, etc. the user is working with.
- The user works. Through the magick of AJAX all the user’s content is implicitly saved.
- If for some reason the user’s PC goes offline, the applications automatically go into offline mode, saving up the changes the user has made, and adding them into the document when a connection is reestablished.
I truly believe it’s that simple. Of course this is basically the idea behind the network appliance that was touted by many a guru at the turn of the century. It didn’t pan out then for now-obvious reasons: the online productivity apps weren’t mature enough. Well, now they are.
