But, honestly, have you ever given this Web-based software a trial run? Have you compared Photoshop on your desktop to Photoshop in the clouds, or your favorite word processer against the Google word processing app on the Web? If you do, you will find that the Web version of Photoshop won’t do very much, and that the Google cloud word processing application makes Microsoft Works look like a powerhouse application.I am not saying that the idea is a bad one. I think that eventually everybody will wind up with a portable terminal of some kind plugged into a worldwide network that has all of the software any of us will ever need. But I am saying that the software that is currently being written for Web computing is dismal at best, in terms of both utility and feature set. The current batch of software does not do much, and what it does it does not do particularly well.
There are reasons for that. The programming languages used to write Web applications are necessarily far removed from the hardware, while programming languages used to write desktop applications have hardware hooks galore. That makes a huge difference. Web apps are not as pretty, they are not as fast, and they are not as useful, at least not yet. Given time, they may be.
But before you buy into the cloud computing concept in a big way, write a document in Word, or Open Office Writer, or even in Microsoft Works. Do a couple of fancy things that you do fairly often. Then go into the cloud and write that same document. Or go try the online version of Photoshop and see how fancy you can get. You will discover that the experience is not nearly the same in the clouds as it is on the desktop. Until it is, you probably should keep your head out of the clouds.
Couldn't agree with your more! I've tried Google Apps and it's completely useless, in my opinion. And the idea that corporations would move to this *ahem* platform is completely laughable.
I will admin, though, that Adobe's new online Express version of PS can be useful for doing very basic touchups, but it seems to have an identity crisis. On the one hand it gears itself to people who want to do simple edits to their personal photos who don't need/can't afford Photoshop, but then they've added on a kind of Flickr functionality to it, making it a photo sharing site.
Posted by: Chris | April 13, 2008 3:00 PM | Permalink to Comment