Nearshore Journal

The Web is almost assured to be the dominant computing platform of the future.

The computing experience is diversifying. In addition to our desktop and laptop computing, consumers also run applications and store their data on game consoles, personal media players, cell phones, and more.

Currently, each of those device types operate on separate, proprietary platforms. Interoperability does not typically exist between them. User created content and settings remain tied to the platform which they are created on. But it’s not the platform that’s important; it’s the data. When using multiple platforms, users are required to duplicate data, which will remain unsyncronized. That frustrates the experience of multi-platform computing. Users sometimes end up locked into the platform whichever platform first creates their data.

As computing continue to diversify, the user’s personal data will be required to present it self in more accessible forms. There are only a few choices on how to accomplish this. Companies either needs to provide data in open formats, or create software for every device type a user may own. Because computer code is governed by copyright and kept closed for competitive secrecy, open standards would be inharmonious with most business strategies. That leaves the burdening task of creating software for all applicable platforms. And there are many, many platforms which consumers use. Here is a current snapshot with market share and sales information complied from Neilsen, Net Applications, IDC, Gartner, Wikipedia and others. It gives some insight into the fragmented state of computing landscape, just within the United States. Major computing platforms in order by size:

160 million PCs with Windows OS
40 million handhelds with Nintendo DS OS
25 million consoles with Nintendo Wii OS
20 million PCs with Mac OS
20 million mobile devices with iPhone OS
18 million mobile phones running RIM OS
15 million consoles with Xbox 360 OS
10 million mobile phones running Windows Mobile OS
10 million netbooks with various editions of Linux OS
9 million consoles with Playstation 3 OS

And add to this the 200 million phones with less sophisticated OS platforms, and you have 500 million devices. And the only common platform among all 500 million is the ability to access programs running through the web.

Running applications on the web is a fairly old concept. Services like email, and web search are already web applications, though we may not think of it in that way. A web application is any dynamic website which you you can interact with, thanks to the code being processed by a server. Sites like eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and nearly all large scale websites incoporate some level of web application functionality. However, what has been missing from most web applications is sophistication. Desktop applications are very mature, and are generally much more robust in their tools, their interfaces, and performance than web applications. But with the continued development of new tools such as CSS3 and Ajax, with javascript libraries such as jquewry and dojo, necessary features and tools are being added to the web standard to bridge the gap in sophistication between it and full fledged desktop computing. Proprietary solutions such as Flex and Silverlight are also providing options. And it’s even expected that Apple will soon create a web-based version of it’s OS interface.

Of all the strategies for dealing with platform segmentation, shifting strategy to run programs from the web seems to be, by far, the most reasonable approach. The internet, or more specifically the http protocol, is currently the only universal, application-level computing standard between devices. Through the web a computer, or a phone, or any of the other device types listed above, can run sophisticated, modern programs. And all devices which connect to the internet via http are capable of sharing the same information. Additionally, migrating applications to the web has increased benefits for stability, virus protection, speed and processing power, and many, many other things.

As rapidly as the market is growing, it may be only months before significant migration is made in the direction of web-based interoperability. If not, then friction, or maybe even a backlash may occur as consumers continue to adopt grater amounts of technology to their lives, and as the technology takes on greater variation.

The only question is, who will bring the change? Companies such as Microsoft have built their market on providing desktop applications. Their dominance may not survive the shift in consumer thinking. Smaller software manufacturers like Intuit have already made strategic moves towards the web as their standard platform. Hardware manufacturers are much further behind in their thinking. And as for Apple, their dependency on closed platforms stands as a tremendous obstacle to interoperability. But despite their cultural objection to openness, they are better positioned to make the shift than others.

If the market is turning its players into web companies, what ramifications will that hold for the shape and sales of hardware?

by Gregor Richardson
Gregor@CreativeMacTraining.com