This recent Supernova discussion on the future of the desktop highlights the challenges that the desktop faces as web services continue to leech users from traditional productivity suites. Though technologists can natter endlessly about infrastructure, very few are thinking about the concepts of behavioral architecture.
Tom Ngo from NextPage called out that many users separate their data into silos intentionally, so decentralization is not a disappearing trends. Users need convenience rather than partitioning - this behavior has little to do with desktop vs. webtop technology, and everything to do with real-world legal requirements. Lili Cheng from Microsoft brought up some real challenges to bringing together disparate information systems. Centralizing services and information means that you have to be mindful of user identity - will users want of all of their identities combined in one place, or will they have privacy concerns? Should work, home, and hobbies all be clumped together? Users shouldn't have to worry about sacrificing the convenience of having their email all in one place because they are worried about exposure or policy issues.
As Kevin Lynch of Adobe noted, having computing power on your own desktop was a revolution back in the 80's. The Web now has another chance to revolutionize applications. Gary Bennitt of Goowy believes in the utopia of all data being accessible from everywhere, and that consumers don't care where there data is, so long as they have access to it.
These arguments have been heard before. The difference this time around? With ongoing decentralization, service providers will have to find business models that focus upon revenue from core value, rather than commodity information that can be distilled and brokered from the same set of available aggregation sources. In addition, though consumers may want to use webtop applications, they may not want their data to be owned - or even hosted - by those webtop application providers. A future is approaching in which data and applications are even more distinct.
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