The Cloud Mentality
Google has turned up the heat on Microsoft with their latest “Going Google” campaign which is aimed squarely at Microsoft’s productivity suite. This coupled with the announcement of Google’s first Operating System means that the next year in web technologies is about to actually get exciting from a platform standpoint.
Google is obviously betting heavily on web applications as being the future of computing as we know it, which ironically brings us nearly full circle to the “dumb terminals” of years past. This bet however is not without it’s caveats which Google will gladly ignore right now, but is ramping up production on solutions.
In order for web applications to truly become a wide success they need to be easily upgradable (much as WordPress is with dedicated hosts now), and that the data is synced across multiple machines while maintaining efficiency across the network (read: push). The new developer version of Chrome has the ability to sync bookmarks and is supposedly building in support for the aforementioned requirements for mass consumption.
However, their latest ad campaign would suggest to the consumer that using Google Apps and all of their services will be comprehensively risk/annoyance free. While Google does do a good job they are far from being the shining star in web application history. From lost and/or corrupt data stemming from a back end security hole, to delayed product support (ZoHo was using Google Gears for offline support before GMail et al were!).
So what are your thoughts in the direction of applications? Are we still a ways off from true web applications that only sync in the browser? Is the Microsoft approach with Office 2010 still the most relevant answer for our needs by offering a synced version of the completely installed suite? Leave your thoughts in the comments or Tweet reply @collegestartups about the direction you think the industry is going and how you plan on using, or even developing entirely new solutions.
Did you want more? Follow @travisketchum here!
DISCLAIMER: Before acting on this post, be sure to read my disclaimer.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment