AboutUI

Desktop? Why?

So, the Hard-disk on my SAP laptop died. For the third time in 6 months. I have a small suspicion that the Good Ole’ T42 is about to reach the big scrapyard in the sky, but with the current offerings from our IT department, I’ll stick to my IBM workhorse as long as I can. The one on my personal desktop died a week ago, so I’m finding myself re-installing two machines at the same time.

Re-installing all the different software which I need for my daily work (full list below), I found myself asking – Why do I bother? Why don’t I have everything browser based, or VM based. My laptop dies? Who care. Its just hardware. I hear this sentiment more and more reflected when speaking to customers. One of them just told me this week: “Product xxx should go to the browser. Why do we need a desktop? why should we incur the cost of supporting a desktop (following the Vista fiasco)?. Our roadmap is inclined towards browser only, looking into virtualization (esp. with HTML 5 coming out). We don’t believe in RIA – the plug-in concept vs. the HTML5 vision”.

I do believe in RIA, but I see the point. As HTML gets better and better (See how Firefox 3.5 handles Video) and the desktop OS’s not becoming any more stable (yeah, yeah, Apple and Linux fan boys), I am trying more and more to keep my information at the cloud. Instead of backing up to an external hard-drive, I’m using Mozy. Instead of jotting things to little notebooks, I’m using Evernote. Remember The Milk. Slowly but surely – I’m going to the cloud. And if this is happening for my personal productivity, what will this mean to Enterprise software? Can we break down the monolith Enterprise apps to small pieces/services which run somewhere else? More to come.

So what did I install?

SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio (Eclipse) – see above