Everything is moving to the cloud. As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from native desktop applications towards Web-hosted clones that run in browsers. For example, a range of products such as Microsoft Office Live, Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, DabbleDB, Basecamp, and many others now provide Web-based alternatives to the full range of familiar desktop office productivity apps. The same is true for an increasing range of enterprise applications, led by companies such as Salesforce.com, and this process seems to be accelerating. In addition, hosted remote storage for individuals and enterprises of all sizes is now widely available and inexpensive. As these trends continue, what will happen to the desktop and where will it live?
This is a guest post by Nova Spivack, founder and CEO of Twine. This is the final version of an article Spivack has been working on in his public Twine.
No. There have already been several attempts at copying the old-fashioned "files and folders" desktop interface to the Web, but they have not caught on. Imitations desktops to-date have simply been clunky and slow imitations of the real-thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: None of them have nailed it. People don't want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC. The Web is an entirely different medium than the desktop and it requires a new kind of interface. The desktop of the future - what some have called "the Webtop" - still has yet to be invented.
Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there has to be some kind of place that we consider to be our personal "home" and "workspace" -- but it's not going to live on any one device.
As we move into a world that is increasingly mobile, where users often work across several different devices in the course of their day, we need unified access to our applications and data. This requires that our applications and data do not reside on local devices anymore, but rather that they will live in the cloud and be accessible via Web services.
The painful process of using synchronization utilities to keep data on our different devices in-synch will finally be a thing of the past. Similarly an entire class of applications for remote-PC access will also become extinct. Instead, all devices will synch with the cloud, where your applications, data and desktop workspace state will live as a unified, hosted service. Your desktop will appear on whatever device you login to, just as you left it wherever you last accessed it. This shift harkens back to previous attempts to revive thin-client computing - such as Sun Microsystems' Java Desktop - but this time it is going to actually become mainstream.
It's a classic embrace-and-extend story - the Web browser began as just another app on the desktop and has quickly embraced and extended every other application to become the central tool on everyone's desktop. All that remains is the desktop itself - and the browser is quickly making inroads there as well. In particular Firefox, with it's easy extensibility and huge range of add-ons, is rapidly displacing the remaining features of the desktop.
If these trends continue, will the browser eventually swallow up or simply replace the desktop? Yes. In fact, it will probably happen very soon. There just isn't any reason to have a desktop outside the browser anymore. What we think of as "the desktop" is really just a perspective on our information and applications - it's really just another "page" or context in our digital lives. This could easily exist within a browser. So instead of launching the browser from the desktop, it makes more sense to launch the desktop from the browser. In this way of thinking, the desktop is really just our home page - the place where we do our work and keep up with our world.
As our digital lives evolve out of the old-fashioned desktop into the browser-centric Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (feeds, lifestreams, microblogs, timelines, etc.). The Web is constantly changing and the biggest challenge is not finding information, it is keeping up with it.
The desktop of the future is going to be more concerned with helping users manage information overload - particularly the overload caused by change. In this respect, it is going to feel more like an RSS feed reader or a social news site than a directory. The focus will be on helping the user to manage and keep up with all the stuff flowing in and out of the their environment. The interface will be tuned to help the user understand what the trends are, rather than just on how things are organized.
As we move into an era where content creation and distribution become almost infinitely cheap, the scarcest resources will no longer be storage or bandwidth, it will be attention. The pace of information creation and distribution continues to accelerate and there is no end in sight, yet the cognitive capabilities of the individual human brain are finite and we are already at our limits.
In order to cope with the overwhelming complexity of our digital lives, we are going to increasingly rely on tools that help us manage our attention more productively -- rather than tools that simply help us manage our information.
It is a shift from the mindset of being librarians to that of being daytraders. In the PC era we were all focused on trying to manage the information on our computers -- we were acting as librarians. Filing things was a big hassle, and finding them was just as difficult. But today filing information is really not the problem: Google has made search so powerful and ubiquitous that many Web users don't bother to file anything anymore - instead they just search again when they need it. The librarian problem has been overcome by the brute force of Web-scale search. At least for now.
Instead we are now struggling to cope with a different problem - the problem of filtering for what is really important or relevant now and in the near-future. With limited time and attention, we have to be careful what we look for and what we pay attention to. This is the mindset of the daytrader. Bet wrong and you could end up wasting your precious resources, bet right and you could find the motherlode before the rest of the world and gain valuable advantages by being first. Daytraders are focused on discovering and keeping track of trends. It's a very different focus and activity from being a librarian, and it's what we are all moving towards.
The Webtop is going to be more socially oriented than desktops of today -- it will have built-in messaging and social networking, as well as social-media sharing, collaborative filtering, discussions, and other community features.
The social dimension of our lives is becoming perhaps our most important source of information. We get information via email from friends, family and colleagues. We get information via social networks and social media sharing services. We co-create information with others in communities. And we team up with our communities to filter, rate and redistribute content.
The social dimension is also starting to play a more important role in our information management and discovery activities. Instead of those activities remaining as solitary, they are becoming more communal. For example many social bookmarking and social news sites use community sentiment and collaborative filtering to help to highlight what is most interesting, useful or important.
Sites such as Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Slashdot, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twine, and many others, show that collective intelligence may be the most powerful way to help individuals and groups filter content and manage their attention more productively. The power of many trumps the power of one.
Our evolving Webtop is going to have more powerful search built-in. It will of course provide best-of-breed keyword search capabilities, but this is just the beginning.
It will also combine social search and semantic search. On the social search dimension, users will be able to search their information and rank it via attributes of their social graph (for example, "find documents about x and rank them by how many of my friends liked them.")
Semantic search on the other hand will enable more granular search and navigation of information along a potentially open-ended networks of properties and relationships. For example you will be able to search in a highly structured way -- for example, search for products you once bookmarked that have a price of $10.95 and are on-sale this week. Or search for documents you read which were authored by Sue and related to project X, in the last month. The semantics of the future desktop will be open-ended. That is to say that users as well as other application and information providers will be able to extend it with custom schemas, new data types, and custom fields to any piece of information.
Forget about shared folders -- that is an outmoded paradigm. Instead, the new metaphor will be interactive shared spaces. These shared spaces will be more like wikis than folders. They will be permission-based environments where one or many contributors can meet, interact synchronously or asynchronously, to work on information and other tasks together.
There are many kinds of shared spaces already in existence, including discussion forums, blogs, social network profiles, community sites, file sharing tools, conferencing tools, version control systems, and groupware. But as we move into Web 3.0 these will begin to converge. We will store information in them, we will work on information there, we will publish and distribute information through them, we will search across them, and we will interact with others around them.
Our next-generation shared spaces will be nestable and linkable like folders, but they will be far more powerful and dynamic, and they will be accessible via HTTP and other APIs such as SPARQL enabling data to be moved in and out of them easily by other applications around the Web.
Any group of two or more individuals will be able to participate in a shared space that will appear on their individual desktops, for a particular purpose. These new shared spaces will not only provide richer semantics in the underlying data, social network, and search, but they will also enable groups to seamlessly and collectively add, organize, track, manage, discuss, distribute, and search for information of mutual interest.
The underlying data in the future desktop, and in all associated services it connects, will be represented using open-standard data formats. Not only will the data be open, but the semantics of the data - the schema that defines it - will also be defined in an open way. The value of open linked-data and open semantics is that data will not be held prisoner anywhere: it will be portable and will be easy to integrate with other data. The emerging Semantic Web and Data Portability initiatives provide a good set of open standards for enabling this to happen.
Due to open-standards and data-portability, your desktop and data will be free from "platform lock-in." This means that your Webtop might even be portable to a different competing Webtop provider someday. If and when that becomes possible, how will Webtop providers compete to add value?
One of the most important aspects of the coming desktop is that it's going to be smart. It's going to have to be. Users simply cannot handle the complexity of their information landscapes anymore - they need help. There are a range of tasks that the desktop should automate for users including: organizing information, reminding users when necessary, resolving data conflicts, managing versioning, maintaining data quality, backing up data, prioritizing information, and gathering relevant information and suggesting it when appropriate.
Most other features of the future desktop will be commodities - but intelligence will still be difficult to provide, and so it will be the last remaining frontier in which competing Webtop providers will be able to differentiate their offerings.
The Webtop is going to learn and help you to be more productive. As you use it, it's going to adjust to your interests, relationships, current activities, information and preferences. It will adaptively self-organize to help you focus your attention on what is most important to whatever context you are in.
When reading something while you are taking a trip to Milan it may organize itself to be more contextually relevant to that time, place and context. When you later return home to San Francisco it will automatically adapt and shift to your home context. When you do a lot of searches about a certain product it will realize your context and intent has to do with that product and will adapt to help you with that activity for a while, until your behavior changes.
Your desktop will actually be a semantic knowledge base on the back-end. It will encode a rich semantic graph of your information, relationships, interests, behavior and preferences. You will be able to permit other applications to access part or all of your graph to datamine it and provide you with value-added views and even automated intelligent assistance.
For example, you might allow an agent that cross-links things to see all your data: it would go and add cross links to relevant things onto all the things you have created or collected. Another agent that makes personalized buying recommendations might only get to see your shopping history across all shopping sites you use.
Your desktop may also function as a simple personal assistant at times. You will be able to converse with your desktop eventually -- through a conversational agent interface. While on the road you will be able to email or SMS in questions to it and get back immediate intelligent answers. You will even be able to do this via a voice interface.
For example, you might ask, "where is my next meeting?" or "what Japanese restaurants do I like in LA?" or "What is Sue's Smith's phone number?" and you would get back answers. You could also command it to do things for you -- like reminding you to do something, or helping you keep track of an interest, or monitoring for something and alerting you when it happens.
Because your future desktop will connect all the relationships in your digital life -- relationships connecting people, information, behavior, preferences and applications -- it will be the ultimate place to learn about your interests and preferences.
This rich graph of meta-data that comprises your future desktop will enable the next-generation of smart services to learn about you and help you in an incredibly personalized manner. It will also of course be rife with potential for abuse and privacy will be a major function and concern.
One of the biggest enabling technologies that will be necessary is a federated model for sharing meta-data about policies and permissions on data. Information that is considered to be personal and private in Web site X should be recognized and treated as such by other applications and websites you choose to share that information with. This will require a way for sharing meta-data about your policies and permissions between different accounts and applications you use.
The semantic web provides a good infrastructure for building and deploying a decentralized framework for policy and privacy integration, but it has yet to be developed, let alone adopted. For the full vision of the future desktop to emerge a universally accepted standard for exchanging policy and permission data will be a necessary enabling technology.
One way to think of the emerging Webtop is as your personal cloud. It will not just be a cloud of data, it will be a compute cloud as well. When you need to store or retrieve information it will provide that service. When you need to do computations, it will provide that to you as well. The cost of harnessing the capabilities of your cloud may be based on a monthly subscription or it may be metered, or it may be ad-supported.
Your personal cloud will have a center - provided by your main Webtop provider, where your address will live -- but most of its services will be distributed in other places, and even federated among other providers. Yet from an end-user perspective it will function as a seamlessly integrated service. You will be able to see and navigate all your information and applications, as if they were in one connected space, regardless of where they are actually hosted. You will be able to search your personal cloud from any point within it. It will look and feel like a single cohesive service.
No discussion of the future of the desktop would be complete without delving into the topic of the WebOS. The shift from desktop to Webtop - the move from a local desktop to a hosted desktop - is a necessary step towards the entire operating system moving to the Web as well. Many of the services that comprise an operating system are already available as Web services, but they are not yet integrated into a single cohesive WebOS. However it seems clear that the major players are aware of this opportunity and are positioning their services to capture it. Just as the desktop OS wars were won by capturing the "high ground" of the desktop, I would not be surprised if the same principle holds in the battle to own the WebOS. Whomever wins the Webtop will win the whole stack.
When I think about what the future desktop is going to look like it seems to be a convergence of several different kinds of services that we currently view as separate.
It will be hosted on the cloud and accessible across all devices. It will place more emphasis on social interaction, social filtering, and collective intelligence. It will provide a very powerful and extensible data model with support for both unstructured and arbitrarily structured information. It will enable almost peer-to-peer like search federation, yet still have a unified home page and user-experience. It will be smart and personalized. It will be highly decentralized yet will manage identity, policies and permissions in an integrated cohesive and transparent manner across services.
By cobbling together a number of different services that exist today you could build something like this in a decentralized fashion. As various services integrate with each other it may simply emerge on its own. But is that how the desktop of the future will come about? Or will it be provided as a new application from one player - perhaps one with a lot of centralized market power and the ability to launch something like this on a massive scale? Or - just as with the previous desktop hits of the past, will it come from a little-known upstart with a disruptive technology? It's hard to predict, but one thing is certain: it is going to happen relatively soon and will be an interesting process to watch.
Image via Arnaldo Licea
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What about the security of the desktop? I'm sure corporations are not anxious to share too much.
Posted by: Rob | August 18, 2008 4:34 PM
I was thinking the same as (1), but from a slight different point of view. WebOS' and WebTops will be a truly viable platform when identity is not based on a few specific tokens like an ID card # or social security or the equivalent in other countries.
Alternative, they will be viable when security is truly bomb-proof. But that I do not think it will ever be.
Posted by: Fabian Schonholz | August 18, 2008 5:44 PM
I think it's going to look like this...
http://www.nestedguis.com
Posted by: Mike | August 18, 2008 5:50 PM
Except that the browser - as is - forces us to use bad technology for developing applications, and will continue to do so for a long time. Yes, wonders are being done, and yes, you can do good work with JavaScript, but at the end of the day you are still hugely limited by the browser.
It's the same problem that dogged Java - you can only ever aim for a lowest common denominator (and any higher level abstraction you provide must be written on top of that).
Not forgetting the step backwards in terms of things like having a reasonably consistent HCI or behaviour - will Sproutcore apps exhibit the same behaviour as Flex ones?? It's interesting to see one of our users didn't even know you could drag'n'drop in our Flex app, or re-order the data grid, because his experience had taught him that browser based apps don't work that way.
How does the user know what may or may not work in a given app? How do I inject additional services into my web apps as I can with my native (Cocoa) ones - Greasemonkey is an answer, but not an easy one. Do we have an architecture where web apps can pick up enhancements to the underlying 'O/S' without being rebuilt in the same way (for example, Leopard added grammar checking to the standard text class shared by most apps that allow text entry).
There is an equal danger of standardising on a single client framework that locks things in too early (as happened with Windows, where even MS have struggled to replace early decisions made for expediency).
I'm not sure on the answers myself, but they're important questions. A counter-argument is that perhaps the browser needs to be subsumed into the desktop - I personally find having a real mail client + webmail using the same IMAP accounts to be more satisfactory than any webmail solution, but equally people like applications like Twitteriffic or NetNewsWire. Perhaps the future will be more along those lines - data moves to the cloud, but applications move out of the browser.
That would mitigate against the idea of 'who wins the webtop wins the whole stack' - instead, the back end becomes open to anyone, using whatever technology works - SOAP, JSON, AMF, Ruby or .NET, Microsoft or Linux - it's not really going to matter to the client, and the 'webtop' becomes something we assemble ourselves.
I'm also unconvinced of the idea of switching from being librarians to day-traders. Many people I know do only use the web to look things up. They don't feel the need to have a constant stream of information, even about things they're interested in. Some of them are even knowledge professionals. How many of us really need information on an hourly or daily basis?
Posted by: JulesLt | August 18, 2008 6:21 PM
Desktop is just a container from which you launch your applications and resources. What services gets displayed, how they are organized and how those services interact with each other is critical irrespective whether those are on desktop or inside a browser.
Author is unnessarily trying suggest that there is something wrong with current metaphor.
Posted by: Get Real | August 18, 2008 6:25 PM
Leading with "The Future of the Desktop" was bold. I was expecting a [vague/controversial/self serving/unbelievable] rant with little insight into what's likely or any mention of motivating factors (value context / how it will happen). But hey, this is RWW so ...
Instead I found this to be an interesting and thought provoking read. It clearly illustrates many new and important concepts, convincing examples and good sound bites. Great job.
A recurring theme is that users will not "choose" a new desktop in the cloud, they will be seduced by new applications that feel more natural and useful. Are there any big vendors covertly coaching this along? I doubt it.
@JulesLt I agree that we are in a troublesome spot with respect to browser based app development. That said I prefer Google's RSS Reader and Twitter's web interface to any of the "rich client" equivalents so I think the current defacto standard has legs.
Posted by: Steve Ireland | August 18, 2008 6:42 PM
So, Brave New World and all that, huh? Few things though:
1. What about security? I don't trust some distant data center to know everything about me. That's why I always keep my truly private info (master contact list, passwords, etc) on my fat client (i.e. my Blackberry)
2. What about power? Browser-based gaming is still a joke. Flash is catching up, but come on. Can the browser really handle everything? Do we want it to? Not to mention that mobile browsers are about 5 years behind desktop versions. Besides, browsers themselves are desktop applications - how can it "swallow" the desktop?
3. What about centralization? The author promises we'll all be sharing and caring all over the Web but doesn't say anything about how different Web sites are going to talk to each other through some kind of standard. Don't say openID - it's great but it just re-routes you to another Web site and then back again. Bad user experience.
Bottom line: I think the Cloud will consume more and more, and will probably win out in the end simply because of the convenience factor, but it's gonna take a long time to realize this vision...
Posted by: Brian | August 18, 2008 6:48 PM
Nice post Nova Spivack.
I think there is a direct corelation between the webtop and desktop share of applications based on available bandwidth.
As available bandwidth increases, more and more applications will migrate to the web.
What we now have is lightweight desktop apps moved to web including email, light office applications etc.
Full data on the web will remain a marginal success till bandwidth reaches near Mb/sec at least for uploads for an average broadband connection.
This is exactly why cloud storage services like IDrive will have a marginal place, for now, but will be mainstream in a few years.
Posted by: Raghu Kulkarni | August 18, 2008 7:46 PM
This is funny, because many people (like myself) already work this way. This isn't about the future of the desktop -- it's about how things already are.
Firefox is the new web desktop. Who uses the desktop or file folders anymore? Who uses Microsoft Office for desktop? Fewer and fewer people. The web desktop is already here.
Posted by: Leo | August 18, 2008 9:07 PM
Good insights.
One additional proposition - the 'desktop' will be overwhelmingly mobile.
Posted by: Roland Dobbins | August 18, 2008 9:47 PM
This is not one but many interesting articles in one :-)
Daytraders: Who besides a small circle needs to know first about some information? My dad doesn't. Even I don't. Whether I read about some Website now in Twitter or 3 days later in RWW, well, most of the time it doesn't matter. Maybe my preferred user name is already gone, but what the heck.
Staying informed before the rest of the world is one of several problems in information management I would say. Another one is to find the find the most relevant information about a topic, which is not necessarily the newest one. That is what you are talking about later in the article, and what is not only relevant for "daytraders".
Posted by: Carsten Ullrich | August 19, 2008 1:20 AM
Truly fascinating post. I wrote up a response at:
http://wearetheweb.wordpress.com/
Posted by: P | August 19, 2008 2:36 AM
Very interesting, I think the future will definately revolve around the Web as a WebOS.
Certainly the interest in some of the new JavaScript frameworks like SproutCore, Objective-J and J-Query (etc.) has pushed the envelope allowing 'Desktop on the Web' applications.
I've written an article all about it you can access it from here:
http://blog.emson.co.uk/2008/08/sproutcore-and-web-applications/
Thanks,
Ben...
Posted by: Ben | August 19, 2008 2:58 AM
@Leo Agreed this isn't the future it's rebranding, cloud computing is like the 'blanket' Web giving you coverage and comfort!
Posted by: Joe Dawson
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August 19, 2008 3:58 AM
This is a tough one. I've been using Twine for months and writing about the Attention Economy for over a year - but I can't help feeling that the semantic future has fallen a tad flat.
Sorry Nova - I want to believe, but how can I when Twine has shown itself to be just an amped-up social bookmarking service? It's great that Twine knows how to tag something when I link to it ... but that's like putting a new set of tail fins on the Buick: it's still just an over-built gas guzzler, or in this case a bookmark and no more.
I thought the point of semantic applications was to bring relevant information out of the cloud (whether that cloud is the web, the desktop, etc.) and insert it into what I am already doing like an invisible reference clerk behind the scenes. If I have to halt my thought process to search for, find, and insert that perfect word/information/photo/metaphor to express my idea or support my arguments then the whole point of the semantic "whatever" is lost.
Bottom line the desktop will remain
Posted by: mhedayat
|
August 19, 2008 4:39 AM
In response to your section on the social webtop, social search engines are becoming the wave of future. Whether the search engine allows you to influence results through comments, or voting, or by click streams alone communal search is here to stay. Take Me.dium for example, they have a social search engine that produces results of where people are actually surfing at the current time. People can be influencers just by downloading a simple toolbar that allows Me.dium to utilize click streams. Anyways, great in-depth article. Keep up the good work.
Posted by: Chris | August 19, 2008 9:11 AM
Great thought-provoking article (why I read RWW). I take a bit of issue to the librarian vs. daytrader metaphor, though.
I think we'll always be librarians-and always should be. The issue is not that search is better than filing, it's that search is better than 'hierarchical' filing. The prime limitations of folders is that they're hierarchical but the way we think is definitely hyperlinked.
Google is great, but it still doesn't know why I like a page. It doesn't know what the content on the page means to me (you're reading this article because you're doing competitve intelligence on Twine; I'm monitoring web trends, etc.). Google can guess and come close, but it will never be close enough. I want to be able to file this page (or pdf or note or whatever) so that it recalls my reaction to that item.
I like to think that in the webtop of the future we'll finally be able to file things in a hyperlinked manner (it's likely something more sophisticated than tags). At that point we'll start remembering what's important about the things we file, rather than how to retrieve them.
Said differently, we'll always be at least part librarian.
Posted by: Lindsay | August 19, 2008 9:17 AM
I like this concept of our desktop being in a hosted web server. and programs also not being installed in our computer but rather in a web server.
Posted by: United Voices | August 19, 2008 10:43 AM
Much of this may be in the far distant future, but thought-provoking regardless.
Posted by: Don Jones | August 19, 2008 11:19 AM
It's hard to believe articles like this are still written - and published! What a surprise! Another brilliant prophet in our midst. There may very well be Webtop technology in our future - that part's easy to predict, since it nearly exists already. But to predict that our thinking and research habits will change or improve, that our privacy will remain protected, that the enormous expense of mounting complex technology will disappear at no cost to anyone, that trends will replace information.... this is prediction about the way our attention is been focused has already been made possible on the current web, and even before the internet. Where is the evidence that it has led to any improvements or benefits, other than to technocrats: to world affairs, to education and literacy, to consumer protection, to technology literacy, to poverty, to energy production? This could only have been written by someone who hasn't had a life away from the screen yet.
Posted by: paul wiener | August 19, 2008 1:00 PM
Who needs to store information in a Cloud when I can buy a many gigabytes hard-disk for a few dollars ?
The Web is a mean of transfer information like a TV ,
a radio or a phone, no for process information on far away computers that belong to Big Brother.
Posted by: EMacaguier | August 19, 2008 3:48 PM
haha... this is just like those old ads from decades ago of what the 20th century will be like. web-based desktops = flying cars
Posted by: sylahr | August 19, 2008 4:11 PM
not actually ads but just their take on the future ;p
Posted by: sylahr | August 19, 2008 4:14 PM
BRILLIANT!
Thanks Nova, and thanks RWW!
All thoughts and topics are expressed with supreme clarity.
This article deserves a follow-up.
As to discussing any particular topic here; this post is so complex it feels like blog comments would not suffice. I would like to join a discussion (forum?) for every topic (yeap, what a geek, I know).
Nova, is this continuing on a particular Twine space?
Posted by: Conrado at OpenGoo | August 19, 2008 10:09 PM
good article , what you think about webos
Posted by: sampat | August 20, 2008 8:52 AM
baloney...a web browser IS a desktop application
Posted by: BillPl | August 20, 2008 12:40 PM
I wonder, if the desktop is skipped, how a browser is going to allocate memory, going to connec to the internet, showing an interface on your screen, basically going to interact with whatever hardware you run it on?
Posted by: Ewald
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August 21, 2008 1:05 PM
How soon these changes arrive also have a lot to do with location: in countries like South Korea and Japan, with higher broadband penetration, more pervasive wireless infrastructures, and more computer users who don't own their computers (using internet cafes and kiosks instead), the cloud is both pragmatically and culturally more feasible.
I have no doubt that cloud computing is going to play a much larger role, especially as the heavy-hitting mobile platforms take hold (iPhone and Android). But especially in America, where concepts of property and proprietorship are so ingrained, some stuff is always going to be local. Take music subscription services--you might blame their failure on the lack of mobile broadband saturation, but more likely, people just want to own their music and do with it what they want. I suspect that security and privacy have much less to do with it than most people think (how much personal info do most people have on their Gmail accounts?).
The key factor in Americans' willingness to delegate to the cloud may be money--if people buy something, they want to "own" it, even if it's just as a file on their hard drive. (Which is why Napster's "Have everything, own nothing" music subscription ad campaign was a catchy, but ultimately failed campaign.) If it's ALSO available on the cloud, then all the better--but we Americans want to have our things, and own them too.
Posted by: Tony T. | August 21, 2008 4:11 PM
Nice post Nova Spivack, you covered lots of information in a thoughtful and logical way. Well done.
To eliminate the fears of data outside the firewall and provide a webOS desktop creating “The personal cloud” is the goal of Stoneware's webOS. http://www.stonewarewebos.com/
Local secure apps, hosted apps and a desktop that is only in a browser.
What do others think?
For full disclosure I work at Stoneware. I hope you will allow this type of post. It is not often this subject is well covered and in front of people who are paying attention. If you do not want to post feel free to respond directly.
kquinton at stone-ware dot com
Thanks again for the time and effort in covering this subject.
Posted by: Ken Quinton | August 21, 2008 10:36 PM
Computation is not moving online (besides gridcomputing that does not need to do instant calculations of compositing etc) and we are far off from having a seamless network experience.
It almost sound like the mainframe discussion that have been going on a couple of times through the times.
I would go for another prophecy instead.
Everything gets better connected.
Posted by: Thomas Petersen | August 21, 2008 11:25 PM
In the new future we won't use PC's. I believe that the shape of PC's will change. There will be some machines with internet connection. Every application will work on internet. There will be standards for developing the web interface and every manufacturer will code the browsers for that standards. Your code will work at most of the machines at the world.
Posted by: SEO Blog | August 22, 2008 2:23 AM
I enjoyed this post. It touches on a remarkably broad list of areas and in a single context. Whether these disparate pieces will ever come together in this way is beside the point. It highlights the connective tissue needed to pull it off.
For me, the biggest question mark is the mediation of personal vs. social/collective information. "Personal" has become a defining attribute of the desktop. "Social" has come to define the Web. Each has their unique complement of benefits. We're not trending from one paradigm to the other, but rather oscillating between two environments. Since, the social component will not displace the personal, a vision of a unified "Webtop" needs to reconcile the two.
This goes well beyond questions of security and privacy. As daunting is the question of semantic interoperability. We can imagine social graphs; we can imagine personal graphs. But when you're envisioning a "semantic knowledge base on the back-end" to manage it all, you need to afford room for services to mediate the personal with the social. Note that this isn't a problem of reasoning over these graphs like some personal assistant. There is a fundamental divide between personal and collective information. We can certainly have our personal space and our social spaces migrated to the Web, but until those worlds are reconciled, it's just a different technical manifestation of a personal desktop.
Posted by: Peter Sweeney | August 24, 2008 7:10 AM
Nova said...
Instead we are now struggling to cope with a different problem - the problem of filtering for what is really important or relevant now and in the near-future. With limited time and attention, we have to be careful what we look for and what we pay attention to. This is the mindset of the daytrader. Bet wrong and you could end up wasting your precious resources, bet right and you could find the motherlode before the rest of the world and gain valuable advantages by being first. Daytraders are focused on discovering and keeping track of trends. It's a very different focus and activity from being a librarian, and it's what we are all moving towards.
The problem you're describing happens because daytraders don't use softwares that does those difficult tasks for them automatically, ie, a software that algorithmically do some of those difficult tasks. In automated trading, this is called algorithmic trading. I am currently developing such a web-based software (as a one-man band). This system eliminates the user from having to identify the trends/patterns manually. The identification is done algorithmically and it is up to the user to take advantage of those important trends/patterns or not.
The main problem in such software is the computing resources, since it needs to scale at runtime because metric calculations are done on the fly and not pre-computed such as is done by Google (in its PageRank algorithm). This means that such compute intensive application to work , it needs computing facilities much bigger than Google.
For example, in pricing of stock options (or any other option derivative) by using such compute/memory intensive Monte-Carlo algorithm, some input parameters of the algorithm are set prior to the starting the computation. If one user sets these parameters too high (slower but accurate result), this usually takes about 40 seconds (in some Monte-Carlo variants) to compute. Now imagine there are 10,000 users (lower end scenario) of this financial analytic application and they all happen to use Monte-Carlo pricing at once (unlikely, but software designers should anticipate such scenario), this will definitely crash the system. Doing this sort of live monte-carlo computation (with many users) is much more intensive than Google search, because Google already pre-computed the eigen-values of the web-pages ranks. In monte-carlo (MC) computation for a web-based financial analytic system, the computation is done live, the reason is because every user will have a choice of values for the parameters as input to MC algorithm, therefore, it is not appropriate to pre-compute these and stored in the database, because what applies to one daytrader or a financial analyst does not apply to another daytrader. In comparison to Google, all documents that are crawled from the internet applies to each and every users who use Google search.
The only thing I see the limitation of cloud computing is the computing resources. There is no problem with moving to the cloud for applications that are not compute intensive, however those that are compute intensive, I think that it is still better to use desktop (connected to the internet), since the compute intensive task is done locally (which is faster), than from a central server in the cloud (too slow).
Posted by: Falafulu Fisi | August 24, 2008 2:29 PM
Great post! I am waiting for the virtual desktop to finally get to it's finished form. As someone who is a webmaster, and has a full time job plus travel I LOVE the convenience of having Google Docs, highly functioning web based e-mail, and the plethora of other web based tools I use every day. Data portability is king, and the virtual desktop is far more portable than the laptop I no longer need to carry every day!
Thanks for sharing!
-Brad
Posted by: Brad Trnavsky - Sales Blogger | September 5, 2008 8:02 AM
Many of these concepts went into our vision of the future browser, Aurora. I encourage you to watch Adaptive Path's videos and read the blog entries that describe our thinking.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/aurora/
Posted by: Dan Harrelson | September 6, 2008 10:07 AM