Haven’t we heard all of this before? I mean about how thin clients will take over the world and relegate the desktop and desktop applications to the past?

I often disagree with Matt Asay’s views (which makes his blog fun to read, if only for the rush of righteous indignation I tend to feel after reading it). But to argue that Google Docs, Zoho et al. are going to replace desktop apps is just plain crazy.

Who wants all their documents stored on someone else’s server where they could be snooped on (or even sold) by wayward systems or database administrators and where Big Government is much more likely to come up with a justification as to why it should be allowed to poke its nose into them at will. No thanks, I think I’ll pass.

Even if a substantial proportion of the general public decided that hosted web apps were the way to go, I can’t see any sane CEO or MD agreeing to their company going down that route. And most of the money in the office suite market is in corporate sales, not least because of widespread piracy by home users.

The only way out of that problem is selling e.g. a Google Docs “appliance”. And once you start going down that route, I don’t really see many advantages over buying a conventional desktop office suite. Sure, with an appliance you get single-point upgrades (and single point of failure too, unlike a desktop suite). Except that (a) there are already tools to manage desktop applications across multiple machines, and (b) as your company grows, you start needing more and more of these appliances, which eventually need to be distributed between your offices so that users get an acceptable response time. Pretty soon you have all the same problems you had before, but now you have this special box that you can’t easily maintain yourself (even if it is commodity kit, fiddling with it is likely to void any warranty or maintenance contracts you may have).

No, sorry Matt, I just don’t buy it.

My two cents: desktop software is here to stay.

Posted by alastair at 1:57 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The newly updated Coriolis Systems website now has a blog too. Hopefully we’ll be able to use that to cut down on our use of e-mail. Also, I can think of at least one useful announcement I can use it to make over the next week or so.

Posted by alastair at 6:56 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s been a while since I last posted on my blog, and people who follow me on twitter, or who read any of the mailing lists I occasionally contribute to will have noticed my absence also.

There are various reasons for this, but the most recent has been that I’ve been busy doing a re-design of the Coriolis Systems website. It’s still a way from where I’d like to be with it, but the new design is a lot better in many respects and what’s more it fixes a couple of long-standing bugs and problems with the old site, the most commonly complained about being that you can now specify your own password.

And, unlike so many websites out there, your password is stored safely on our server; even we can’t read it, and we won’t be told by our site about any incorrect passwords you may try (well, we’ll be told you’ve tried, but not what you tried). A lot of websites’ administrators have direct access to cleartext copies of your password (if you use the same password everywhere and this doesn’t scare you, it probably should).

It should be a lot easier for people to download our software now too… as long as you’re logged-in, all the download demo links change to download links for the full version.

Posted by alastair at 4:10 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently, hiccuping is a throwback to a part of our evolutionary history where our distance ancestors still had gills.

I also like the way the author of the piece claims that

There must, however, be a reason why hiccupping persists 370 million years after animals started hauling themselves onto the land.

Apparently he or she is a subscriber to the old chestnut that there must be a reason for everything. For what it’s worth, I suspect that there is no good reason for the persistence of the hiccup—but since there is no obvious evolutionary disadvantage to keeping it, there doesn’t actually need to be.

Posted by alastair at 3:08 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)