About cloud computing, hosting web apps and streaming the software
“Streaming Office will clobber Google Apps, eventually driving the search giant out of the hosted applications business altogether.”
Read Randall C. Kennedy’s article, “Streaming Office: Death knell for Google Apps?”, on InfoWorld.
“A streamed version of Office would be stored on a server at a hosting provider or enterprise but delivered bit by bit to users on demand through a local network or the Internet, just as streamed music and video are. The software code will be stored on the local PC and persist even after a user logs off. That means that while opening Office for the first time may take four minutes or more, subsequent start-ups should take only 10 to 20 seconds (…) Is £4.99 a month cheap enough to pull customers away from Google Apps, which costs a little more than $4 (£2) a month?”
Read Eric Lai’s article, “Microsoft to trial web streamed Office suite“, on PC Advisor.
“Rather than configuring, installing and testing software for each individual PC, companies can use SoftGrid to create a central store for applications that are sent over in piece parts, or “streamed,” to end users over company networks. (…) The SoftGrid software stores a local “cache” of each application, which doesn’t affect the desktop machines’ configuration. Eliminating the need to manually set up PCs will save companies money when they install new applications or need to introduce changes to existing software.”
Read Martin LaMonica’s article, “Start-up promises streaming desktop apps“, on CNET. Note that the article was published in 2003 and that Microsoft is now offering SoftGrid as one of their own products.
“So is that model going to finish off web application suites like Zoho? Call me hopelessly biased or hopelessly delusional but I vehemently disagree.”
Read Sridhar’s blog, “Streaming Office vs True Web Apps“, on Zoho.
So, this months’s controversy happens to be framed in terms of the potential impact of what appear to be substitute technologies.
I cannot help wondering whether a more relevant question would be if the market can eventually bear different deployment paradigms and business models, as each one is showcasing a different set of pros/cons followed by subsequent trade-offs.
As far as I can tell, the underlying trends are:
- personal computers keep delivering higher processing horsepower and storage capacity, which is now true even for a wide variety of mobile devices, e.g. iPhone;
- “virtualization” and the “network as platform concept” continue to gaining momentum, e.g. Web 2.0 apps;
- broadband access is becoming ubiquitous and upstream and downstream bandwidth are also expected to keep increasing for fixed and wireless connections.
As intelligence is growing at both edges of the network (e.g. devices and servers) and is becoming pervasive, we now see a range of deployment paradigms and a healthy mix of online/offline plays evolving:
- Microsoft’s move enabling a traditionally thick client offline application such as Office to become both a hosted and streaming service, thus embracing cloud computing. Additionally, the company’s recent launch of Silverlight competing head to head with Adobe’s Flash should also be noted.
- Google’s cloud computing mantra has been coupled with off-line capabilities known as Google Gears. This is further extending the capabilities of web browsers by enabling offline access to traditional online services.
- Adobe’s recent launch of AIR is intended to be enable rich Internet applications, RIA, to be deployed as desktop applications, a browserless experience.
This is one subject I am very interested in. So, I’ll share some more insights in future posts. In the meantime, I will welcome your comments and emails.
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| J. de Francisco |  |
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| Chicago, 8 May 08 |  |
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