Desktop Applications Migrating Online

A few weeks ago wakoopa (Dutch startup tracking software usage) launched. It is still in its early stages and there aren’t really all that many users but initial statistics confirm what I (and many others) have suspected for a long time now: Browsers are the most used program on our desktops. In fact: 4 browsers (Firefox, IE7, Opera and Flock) can be found in the top 10 list with all of them except Flock in the top 5. With the (small) rendering improvements IE7 brought us, most of the sites online are displayed (mostly) the same, what I see in IE7 and Opera looks a lot alike, whether I am viewing it in Vista, OSX or any Linux Distribution. Why is this happening? Simple: the applications you were using 10 years ago on your desktop has moved to the web.

Topping wakoopa’s list too is Microsoft Office Word and Outlook (both of which have their online counterparts). So you see, nothing most of us do on a daily basis isn’t already available online. Pretty soon it won’t really matter which OS you use. Software is disappearing from our hard drives and migrating online. Microsoft’s new Flash Killer, Silverlight is making feature rich online applications an even bigger reality. Within a few years, the only thing that matters is your browsers. Applications within the browsers will all look identical.

From an interaction point of view, application migration from the desktop to the web is posing somewhat of a problem. We have, in fact, moved back a couple of years. Things like right clicking and dragging (interactions we are used to from the desktop) are only now starting to become a reality online. I am yet to see double clicking though. However, on the other hand, applications will (for the most part) behave the same in most environments. Once a user has learned how to use it in Opera on their Ubuntu system, it will behave the same way in OSX using Safari. Companies like Google are already working on online hard drives, giving you access to your work wherever you are from any browser. File managers like the Finder in OSX and Windows Explorer in Vista or XP will seem redundant.

High resource applications such as image editing software will still remain desktop based, for a while at least, although Adobe is developing an online version of Photoshop. So you see, pretty soon it won’t really matter to the average user which OS he uses, as long as they have a have a browser to access his applications.