April 9, 2008, Gartner Emerging Trends conference – Apparently several Gartner Group analysts (Neil MacDonald and Michael Silver) had more things to say about Vista, and by extension, Windows in general. This included the complexity of the OS, its lack of modularity, and its hardware requirements. When looked at in light of an increasing movement to Web-based and other OS-agnostic applications, that’s not good news.
I have mixed feelings about Web apps. If you want to run a Web-based app and your Internet connection is down or not available, you are out of luck. That really isn’t far fetched – I live in Texas and we had severe weather yesterday and outages for 8 about hours. Or if you travel a lot, be it by ground or air transportation, you generally won’t have Internet access while you’re enroute (or its really expensive!) – so using your browser to access an application isn’t going to be of much use when you’re on a cross-country flight.
The other issue with web-based applications is bandwidth. Many websites seem to think everyone accessing them has a T1 (or faster) connection. Not always the case. Many hotels have a shared DSL and it can be slow. There are even some parts of the country where the only access available for home users is (gasp!) dialup.
If apps are going to be web-based, I think a desktop version also needs to be available.
