Battling Google, Microsoft Changes How It Builds Software

[VetLegion]

Originally posted by Darkstar
They aren't around the corner. They've been with us for quite a while now. They just tend to suck so badly from a user's point of view, that your mind is blocking out your experience with them.

Amazon and Apolyton are not good examples. They are only made possible by the network and can't exist only on one desktop PC.

You need to look at things that can be done both as applications running on the desktop and apps running remotely, and see where such remotely-run applications have been gaining ground over desktop based applications. As far as I can tell - not in many places.

There are text processors, games, CAD programs you can on a remote server --- and they all suck compared to desktop based apps. Compare the ease of use of Google Earth in your browser and Google Earth desktop application. Wherever an application is used intensively during work the big issue is lag. When (if) online applications can be made as responsive as those on desktop, only then can they compete. I don't see this happening in the forseeable future, due to significant lag introduced with all the switching on the internet.

[Darkstar]

Vet, I say again:

Look at SAP. You know what they are used for? Thin clients used to access Payroll and other H&R applications.

If you are anywhere near North Alabama, let me know and I'll invite you into work, and show you the plethoria of all the online apps we run. Most where at one time C/S apps, with the client only using an external, shared DB. Now all that is purely web apps.

Anything that used to be C/S architecture is now Web Apps. You know, Online Apps. That's all over the place in business. Time card apps, supply requistions, trouble ticket, action tracking, health and safety reporting, inventory, etc etc etc.

Business software used to run on the Main Frame, with dumb terminals being used to access the Main Frame. Then the business world transitioned to C/S architecture, so that the common worker could fill out status reports in Word, attach that report to an email, and send that email to their managers while using dumb terminal emulators talking to a mainframe or DB server, or thick client software that talked direcly to the DB. Now, the business world has replaced all that dumb terminal emulators and all the clients with simple web interfaces (which call on server applications that handle all the non-DB related heavy lifting).

We've been in the network age for a long time. It's just a matter of what front door you use to access the main repository that has changed in the past 40 years.

And Amazon and Apolyton do count. They exist because the network (the Internet) exists. They demonstrate what access to the masses mean. It's not like Amazon or Apolyton is new. Look at the original networks, and you find online commerce and similar communities. Whether it's Compu-serve, Qlink, or any of the early, private consumer networks, you still had the same things.

[Darkstar]

We do, btw, have network CADs and remote text editors. You are right, the suck in comparison to what you can do on your own top line desktop. But they aren't laggy.

It just depends on your network layout, and if you are trying to run your network app with its host computer in Japan and the routing going twice around the Earth, or if you are only running it from a host a mere two major links away, with plenty of pipeline available.

[MarkG]

Originally posted by VetLegion
Amazon and Apolyton are not good examples. They are only made possible by the network and can't exist only on one desktop PC.

the same applies to your google earth example. it cant exist with out data from the net

[loinburger]

When the network lag drops to within, say, an order of magnitude of cache access speed, then maybe we'll start seeing thin clients replace desktops. As it stands, I don't think that desktop applications are going anywhere soon.

[Darkstar]

It's not a matter of lag versus cache. You can do most of your business now via Web Forms, and most companies are.

However, it's much more convinent for the business world to have real desktops for their average worker. Their average worker gets to keep local as well as network copies of their data, making them feel better (and a requirement to make sure you have your needed little files, as both ends will occasionally fail, regardless of how good your IT is). And since the CEO and his management chain are just average users with a bigger budget, they have the same needs and comfort requirements as well.

Personally, I don't think we will ever see a complete loss of the powerful desktop --- consumer gaming alone assures us that some form of desktop will always be around, and that will help keep it as an occasional flavor in the business place. But anything that works well as a C/S works just as fine in whatever flavor of network app you want. And that means that you can have the vast majority of a business's software tools as network apps. Which reduces a business actual cost, which means business will have no reason to desert that model of tool usage.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Asher
The fact that they overhauled their entire development model is in direct response to increasing competition.

I'm not sure that is entirely true Asher. It sounds like they were responding to their own internal needs as much as responding to google. Automating the debugging and creating the software gates to reject buggy code cuts costs for them and that's why they're doing it not because of google.

[VetLegion]

Darkstar, well, I don't disagree with you very much.

The argument in this thread went something like this: "Microsoft is getting more competition from Google and others which jeopardizes the concept of desktop computing itself"

We can break it into two:

1) "Online applications are the next big thing and will kill applications that run on desktop (Office, games, etc.)"

2) "As apps are transfered to the servers, desktop machines can become simpler and be run on linux - Windows OS is going to lose ground."

And then we can subdivide the market into two parts, the home and the business markets, which are different.

I think neither of two points is going anywhere in the home computing market. And frankly I don't know enough about the business market to discuss the trends there.

[VetLegion]

Originally posted by MarkG
the same applies to your google earth example. it cant exist with out data from the net

I hate them for it. I pay for traffic and Google Earth doesn't seem to cache maps on the disk for long time. All I'm interested in is Croatia and since it won't cache it I have to download it every time I want to see something.

[DanS]

The center of gravity seems to be shifting away from the desktop computers. Not that word processing will be done entirely on the web in the futre, but that new apps are being added on the web much faster than they are being added to the desktop.

In any event, even a desktop machine is often simulated nowadays through Citrix. At home, I can get a virtual desktop machine through the internet to my office.

[DanS]

And as for the headline question, it sounds like Microsoft's worst enemy is Microsoft, not Google.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by DanS
The center of gravity seems to be shifting away from the desktop computers. Not that word processing will be done entirely on the web in the futre, but that new apps are being added on the web much faster than they are being added to the desktop.

In any event, even a desktop machine is often simulated nowadays through Citrix. At home, I can get a virtual desktop machine through the internet to my office.

I think that I have seen three or four shifts of "the center of gravity" in the last 20 years, and everytime it has been claimed that now is the final way of doing things esthablished. I guess that in a couple of years we will see yet another shift in "the center of gravity".

Well, I don't mind much since every shift has meant that work was aplenty .

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Oerdin


I'm not sure that is entirely true Asher. It sounds like they were responding to their own internal needs as much as responding to google. Automating the debugging and creating the software gates to reject buggy code cuts costs for them and that's why they're doing it not because of google.

Quite true. It has nothing to do with competition. Their problem was that they had lost control with longhorn and had to scrap everything starting again from scratch.

It even seems that they are going the unix way with a core OS where apps are built upon instead of that monolithic mess called windows.

[Sprayber]

I have heard a lot of terms thrown around while reading this thread and eating my burger. All I really want to know is how all of this will affect my porn?

[loinburger]

Originally posted by Darkstar
It's not a matter of lag versus cache.

Agreed, but there's also the granularity problem. If I've got to frequently send a few thousand bytes of protocol overhead just to tickle a few bytes of data out of the server then something has gone wrong with the program design.

I can see distributed apps making a great deal of headway against desktop-only apps, e.g., using a thick client to parse the source code and then using a thin client to execute all of the proprietary and computationally intensive code optimizations. But I don't see desktops being phased out in lieu of dumb terminals anytime soon.