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Is It Time for the Networked Computer?
Google’s venture into hosted software certainly has generated some excitement. (Information Week reported that the FAA Chief Information Officer David Bowen is considering skipping a Windows upgrade in favor of Google’s Web apps.)
Google is not the first company to promote the idea of running applications on a remote server rather than on your local hard drive. Oracle tried it twice during the 1990s, and failed both times.
“The personal computer is a ridiculous device," Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison proclaimed in 1999, predicting that Microsoft would yield to the Web application-fueled computer. Ellison called it the "Networked Computer."
Ellison's vision may not have panned out at the turn of the millennium, but technology, of course, has advanced a lot since then. Internet connections are faster and more reliable, for starters.
What’s your opinion? Are you ready to have all your application and data stored on a remote server while you access them through a scaled-down computer that’s essentially nothing more than a browser machine?
By David Perera at Link | Comments (1)
Comments
©2007 by National Journal Group Inc. All rights reserved.
I would be uncomfortable with storing my data on a remote server, but worse than that there are still a lot of people (like me) who live in rural areas and do not have access to high speed connections. Currently my only internet access is at work and my experience in working with data on a server here is not favorable - it is extremely slow!! It is much faster to work on your own hard drive whenever possible. In addition at one time we had to use software that was loaded on the server and it was maddening, because you could not set options the way you want them - someone else was always changing them. So every time you opened a new instance of the application you had to spend a good deal of time setting up all your options.