Goodbye Desktop, Hello Cloud.

I was talking to one of my students and she said that she would switch to a Mac. But she didn’t want to have to buy all of her apps over again. I asked what apps she was talking about and she said, her office apps, Word, Excel and Powerpoint. My first thought was you could get Office for Mac and then I thought you can do all of that with online apps like Google Docs. Welcome to cloud computing.
We at MacMost do most of our word processing online using Google Docs, we can share and edit documents easily as well as print or save them as word docs of even PDFs. The same thing with spreadsheets with Google Spreadsheets and scheduling using Google Calenders and of course there’s Gmail.
The big advantages are we don’t have to buy multiple licenses of Microsoft software and we can share and edit our documents from any where we can access a Web Browser. The only real disadvantage is that you have to save very often in case you lose your internet connection, and not being able to access things when you can’t get an internet connection or when the local connection to the internet is down.
The whole idea is that soon you won’t need a ton of storage and a super fast processor on your computer, you’ll depend on the internet’s servers for that. You would be surprised how many apps you no longer need on your computer. You can do your taxes, edit video, edit photos get your news and a host of things that you used to do with a desktop app all within a Web browser. The only problem is going to be what to do with all that space and money you freed up by getting rid of your desktop applications.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Goodbye Desktop, Hello Cloud.”

    Sergio
    16 years ago

    This is the same thing that Chris Pirillo has been saying for a long time. I am an avid watcher of his live feed and I can honestly tell you that he has said many many times that software is moving to the net. Eventually there wont be a need to buy software, the only need would be a constant internet connection which in due time will happen!

    Ian
    16 years ago

    This makes me think of virtual desktops like http://g.ho.st, which can be used to access web apps. Also software such as Fluid for Mac make using web apps very easy. However personally i don't trust my internet connection enough just yet, and the online apps aren't as good as desktop apps yet, so I've just ordered iWork.

    The only thing is the iWork trial ends in 6 days and limited stock means I won't get iWork in time, I might have to export essential files to Excel and upload them to Zoho to update the files in the meantime, or... and this worries me... I might have to use my parents Windows PC which has Excel. There is NeoOffice which I used a lot on Tiger, but I understand it still crashes apps on Leopard.

    16 years ago

    Another great online word processor is avasilable through Adobe. check out Buzzword http://www.buzzword.com very easy to use and looks great too.

    I use it for most of my word processing.

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