[web] The impending death of the desktop?

I don't think we'll see the end of the desktop in the next 10 years, mainly because that I would bet that almost all users, despite perhaps being rooted in office/email/web work, also does at least 1 other thing that really requires a locally executing piece of software. eg. Gaming, sound/music, photo manipulation, software development, etc. All these require a significant amount of bandwidth and typical web latencies of 150ms or so would not suffice.

Buzz Report: Good-bye, computer; hello, world!

Interseting concept. The part that I initially fear is the whole "renting" software business. We haven't even figured out liscencing for bought software; who knows what software companies would do to us if they made us rent their software. But if it were made by Google, it would be all that is good, no?

I think that "online" software or - at the very least - networked software is always appealing to businesses and even home consumers who are looking for new productivity suites and such. However, I would certainly hope that people would not turn to web browsers to render Office (even though they already do - we have PDF viewers, Office plug-ins, etc. Let me throw up a bit before I continue)

Or perhaps it's the ultimate conglomeration?

The problem I see is that parts of the industry are advancing at such encridible rates, and yet others are way behind the times. So while one group may be ready to move forward, the technology defined by another group isn't available or supported. Bleh now I'm thinking about that IE7 thread again.

If it's one thing I think we can all agree on, it's that regardless of how fast this industry changes, nothing ever just "happens". Windows isn't being destroyed by Linux or Mac OS, or both together. 9 years after the Portable Network Graphics file format was made a W3C Recommendation, we're still using GIF and JPEG (inferior formats the majority of the time).

Anyway, those were just some very incomplete (probably useless) thoughts I have.

Ha........ha.............ha

No, the desktop is here to stay. No one will pay hundreds of dollars for a piece of machine that only does one function. Not going to happen.

openoffice, enough said.

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Original post by oconnellseanm Ha........ha.............ha No, the desktop is here to stay. No one will pay hundreds of dollars for a piece of machine that only does one function. Not going to happen.

But if that one function is running a fully-fledged web browser which can run active content, then that 'one thing' is equivalent to running an operating system. Would you say "No-one will pay hundreds of dollars for a piece of machine that only runs one OS"? *points at pre-PPC Apple*

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Original post by fractoid Quote: Original post by oconnellseanm Ha........ha.............ha No, the desktop is here to stay. No one will pay hundreds of dollars for a piece of machine that only does one function. Not going to happen. But if that one function is running a fully-fledged web browser which can run active content, then that 'one thing' is equivalent to running an operating system. Would you say "No-one will pay hundreds of dollars for a piece of machine that only runs one OS"? *points at pre-PPC Apple*

If their sole purpose was to browse the web, then there's no reason they'd have to be hundreds of dollars. There would be relatively little processing power required, and you could probably get away with just really lower-end equipment.

I don't think it'll go this way. One thing I could see happening is the type of computer I mentioned previously being manufactured, but also "normal" desktops as well that had a higher range of functionality. I really don't think the desktop will die for a while yet. I think it could phase more towards the other type for people doing solely that, but there is still quite a bit that people do on PCs besides that. My guess is that desktops, as we know them, will available twenty years from now, albeit likely looking different. Their purpose, though, would be very much the same.

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Original post by oconnellseanm Ha........ha.............ha No, the desktop is here to stay. No one will pay hundreds of dollars for a piece of machine that only does one function. Not going to happen.

That was kind of the point. If a web browser can do everything that a desktop can do, why would you bother with all the unnecessary complications associated with it?

I can't see how developers will make games work through a web browser. I mean, not cutting-edge 3d ones.

I can see how the turn-based strategy games can work through a web browser. We can play poker, monopoly, backgammon through a web browser.

And thanks to popcap.com etc we can also play some fun little realtime puzzle games through the web browser (although some of them use signed ActiveX native code, which I consider "cheating").

But I don't see a web-browser based Unreal Tournament.

Modern games require a lot of data, and developers also want the lowest level access to the hardware possible. Web browsers just don't give that kind of access, certainly not in a platform-independent way, and certainly not to unsigned applications.

Mark

Bullshit. People have been predicting the death of desktops ever since desktops appeared. It's not happening now, it's not happening soon, it's not even happening eventually.

Now, the appearance of super cheap desktops with minimal graphics and "slow" CPUs (e.g. 1 GHz Durons), that's a different story.

Could we see some sort of combination over the next few years? KDE and mozilla has their guis written in xml and MS are planning too, from there it might not be too hard to use a combination of both. Do all the basic stuff on the computer and all the complex stuff can be handled on a dedicated server where it can be easily maintained.

One interesting question would be how open source software would work in such a scenario. Providing ftp sites are one thing but how could they afford to have users running apps over the net?

From my scanner to you:



People have been predicting this for years. Mainly the old school server crowd that hate selling to individual consumers (they tend not to buy multi-million dollar long term support contracts while playing golf with the company salesman). They want to make things the way they where, when individuals didn't own computers. However that's only what they want, it has no connection with reality. In 10 years all they have to show is WebTV (there where a few WebTV alikes during the beginning of the last "the desktop is dead" cycle 10 years ago, but they all failed).

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Original post by Michalson~freakish scan~

You need to warn people before you do something like that >:(

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I've come to the conclusion that Windows will actually be destroyed by Internet Explorer (and other web browsers).

Windows is destroyed by Internet Explorer all the time. Where have you been?

It will never happen.

1) As pointed out above, most people do at least one thing that would not work through a browser.
2) Even if we all got a 32mbps connection to the internet, it would still be too slow for some applications.
3) It would be the death of hardware and propriety software industries. They will never do it. FLOSS won't do it either because such an enviroment is not programmer/tinker friendly enough.