

Ajax Startup Launches Web Desktop Linked To Gmail - donna
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=3QWZOBMEGCVGOQSNDLRCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=201804435

======
karzeem
"'What was missing from the market was the notion of the unified experience,'
[Robertson] said." I don't understand the obsession people have with cramming
thousands of apps into a single site. It seems to miss the point of the web.
Isn't it much better for apps to run on their own sites with their own
interfaces? Interoperability and sharing data between apps is huge, but the
answer is not to put all apps on the same site. What are users supposed to
think? "Oo, feature-crippled versions of all my favorite apps!" Web desktops
strike me as having the worst of both worlds: none of the feature richness of
the web and none of the UI advantages of the desktop. For non-power users,
having everything in one place doesn't seem compelling enough to ignore that.

In fairness, the writer may have taken Robertson's comment out of context or
altered its meaning, so apologies if that wasn't the fairest launching pad for
a rant about web OSes.

~~~
cstejerean
I've been asking myself the same question for a while. I would like a unified
experience so I have to spend less time worrying about interoperability, etc.
On the other hand having a choice about every application means I can have the
best application in every category. I wonder where the middle ground lies.

~~~
karzeem
Facebook is probably one of the best unified experiences, but I guess if
you're looking for something very OS-y, something like this is more your bag.
Users shouldn't have to be the ones to worry about interoperability, but c'est
la vie. Now if I can only find a French phrase about balancing trade-offs...

------
rms
First off, you can't call your desktop environment Windows. That's just asking
for a cease and desist.

Second, why copy the Windows GUI when you can do something more suited for the
browser?

~~~
cstejerean
I think the problem might be that most users are used to the Windows UI
experience so in order to reduce the learning curve this might have been the
easiest option. However if the call it Windows and has a Windows GUI look and
feel they are really asking for trouble.

------
eusman
i think where all these desktop copycats fail, approaches like NetVibes and
widjets, succeed.

We all know the reasons for that, with the most important being that human
kind needed to get away from desktop to web because of the decentralization of
information.

oh and the "start" task bar every one of these tries to mimic, is soo
1995...come on, some innovation wouldn't hurt us...

by the way, this thing it crashed my firefox v3...

------
andreyf
Web OS will take off when you can run Win32 native apps on them... or GTK
apps, or OSX native apps...

------
andreyf
What's 'middleware'?

------
fdb
Wow! That's a lot of buzzwords in one sentence.

------
rokhayakebe
I just gave a quick look. It looks decent.

