Jason Kottke offers a clear and concise discussion of how the underpinnings of personal computing are evolving. In essence, we're moving from a PC-centered to a network-centered world. More and more applications will run in browsers (or browser-like platforms such as Google's Desktop, Yahoo's Konfabulator and Apple's Dashboard) rather than as traditional, standalone programs installed on individual hard drives, and whether your data resides locally or on some distant server will ultimately be both transparent and irrelevant. As Kottke shows, most of the dominant players in PC software (at least on the consumer side) are embracing this vision, happily or fearfully.

Kottke notes that one of the hurdles to this model is that the browser provides a primitive user interface, lacking the robustness and responsiveness of standalone applications. (Whatever the faults of Word, do you really want to do your word processing in a browser window?) He quotes Paul Graham as arguing that while the browser interface has a lot of problems, it's "good enough" for most people's purposes. That's probably an overstatement at the moment, but it won't be an overstatement for long. The browser interface - or what I think would be better termed the utility interface - is going to advance rapidly, as many companies compete for control over it.

A couple of glosses on Kottke's thinking. First, he doesn't pay enough attention to the interests of businesses in the evolution of personal computing. Photo-sharing, music-playing, and blog-reading applications are certainly important and interesting, but most people's computing decisions are determined as much or more by the needs of their employers as by their own personal interests and diversions. Cost, security and reliability concerns will ultimately lead companies to demand even less local data and applications than Kottke imagines. The user devices will become ever thinner, as applications, data and even the user operating system resides in central servers. Whether you're using Word on Windows or Google Word Processing on Google Desktop, it will all be supplied over the Internet rather than from the bowels of your own PC. Second, and related, Kottke's assumption that a lot of content needs to be replicated locally (so you can continue working when, for instance, on a plane) reflects the current gaps in connectivity. Those gaps aren't going to be around forever. In five or ten years, we'll have ubiquitous high-speed network connections, and at that point the need for local data, apps and web servers goes away. Your personal desktop, residing entirely on a distant server, will be easily accessible from any device wherever you go. Personal computing will have broken free of the personal computer.

3:29:57 AM    comment   

It’s been hard to write this essay on Skype and Google, because the world is changing faster than I can put the words together. And whilst I’m happy with the general thrust of the argument, I’m sure much of the detail will be muddled. I hope you’ve got the patience to stick with it, and look forward to your feedback.

Putting together Skype and Google, whilst no match made in heaven, does have a lot of synergy. The Skype client, or something very like it, has the potential to re-invent telephony. (That, after all, is the point of the Stupid Network, not disintermediating legacy voice toll charges.) It just requires you to stop thinking of telephony as an application, and instead just see it as a feature of a bigger communications framework.

3:28:51 AM    comment