Web apps: A long and winding road

The road ahead for Web apps is paved with potholes and gold, as commenters noted repeatedly in my post about client apps dying a slow death, pretty much taking one side or the other. Yet, even if you feel the desktop will be around for the next decade, you can't deny that the Web has all of the momentum and that the client is becoming thinner and thinner.

Think of the good old days before Webmail became the most common way consumers retrieve their e-mail. Microsoft Word, Outlook, project management software that is oblivious to the Web, unconnected utilities. Today, desktop bound software such as Microsoft Outlook, while still incredibly dominate in the enterprise and with some consumers, is obviously just as dependent on the Internet being secure and reliable. You can switch to offline mode, but that's possible with Webmail as well.

Yet, Outlook can be crash-prone and still has trouble, after all these years, downloading a large volume of messages in one session. Most importantly, your e-mail security depends on both ends of the connection, no matter how secure Exchange is. It's like saying I'm secure because I drive a Hummer (theoretically), even though there are plenty of Nissan drivers who can crack a dent in my car with ease.

Word processing, I believe, will be the next market to be overtaken by Web apps. It's already happening at some companies that use Amazon web service and Google Apps for the enterprise. ThinkFree Office already has a good inline spell-checker, and Zoho Writer has run reliably for me for weeks at a time.

Some battles have already been won. CRM vendors such as Salesforce.com have a clear lead over complex enterprise packages from, say, Oracle. With an abstraction of software from hardware, mobile users can rely on Salesforce to feed them customer information no matter which client they use, from anywhere. That's the golden road of Web apps.

So what are the potholes? For some, the debate over who owns the data when it's in the cloud is not a trivial matter. I used to be an IT director, and I can attest to the fact that privacy in the enterprise is a critical issue. It's one thing to have your CRM data housed externally, and something else entirely to let a vendor control your company financials. It's gong to take a lot of work before Web apps invade the accounting department and investment firms.

One commenter in my client death post noted that the Internet can fail, and that means a loss of productivity. Of course, ERP systems rely heavily on the Internet as well, as do unified communication systems and desktop e-mail. It's also important to realize that, in a large enterprise, Internet access is rarely down. I worked for ten years in the corporate world and can remember only one day when my Web connection was unavailable, and it was only for about ten minutes.

Someday, the cloud will overtake the desktop. Microsoft knows this full well. The few lone hold-outs will be those working on very high resolution video files and graphics, and even then - it will be a matter of time before the desktop finally disappears, replaced by a client so thin you'll have to squint to see it.