Did you catch that Google is releasing an operating system? It prompted me to think about the future of desktop apps, desktop operating system as we know them currently, and cloud computing.
I use 3 desktop apps right now:
- Photoshop
- Picasa
- iTunes
That’s it. Everything else I do in a browser. Word processing and spreadsheets: Google Docs. Email: Gmail. Etc.
With the advent of streaming media sites like Hulu, Netflix, and Pandora…I can’t help but think iTunes will be replaced by web-based versions sooner rather than later.
If you think about it…Apple is already making that move on the iPhone OS 3.0 with wifi downloads of music, podcast, and movies. As the iPhone hard drive storage increases, and wifi download speeds increase…there won’t be much of a need for iTunes.
As far as the Adobe Suite of products go – I don’t think they’ll move away from the desktop. At least not in the next 5 years. Performance requirements are ridiculously high for these apps, and unless websites can find a way to harness the end-user’s CPU through a browser…it ain’t happenin anytime soon.
I’ve been trying to figure out a way to centralize all of my data across computers. Cloud storage and backup has piqued my interest. Carrying an external backup hard drive around everywhere with me isn’t always convenient. Or secure. So I signed up for a free Dropbox account this morning and am gonna give it a test run between all of my machines.
I’m hoping that the cost of cloud storage will continue to decrease, but for about $0.15 per gig…it’s worth it to have 24/7 backups of most of my personal data…not to mention 24/7 accessibility from a web browser.
Final thought:
We are happy users of Basecamp. When I finished installing Dropbox, I couldn’t help but think “what if I could sync project files to our Basecamp storage?”
Or, what if I could bring my own storage when I signed up for Basecamp?
Extraordinary times, folks.
