Here’s my problem: let’s say you love the idea of building a web app for a million reasons. it’s easier to build, a cinch to update the UI….. and desktop apps are obsolete, right? (everyone keeps telling me so)
So anyone building anything could only entertain web apps as the solution.

But now let’s add that the app is going to house private data which cannot be compromised under any circumstance.

How do you reconcile those two conflicting realities?

If you’re on the verge of developing something, and its purpose involves storage of anything that must not be breached, which road do you take in the modern world?

how do you afford people the highest level of privacy and security (and control) without pedaling back to the Dark Ages by building desktop software????

is there such a thing as a desktop application that is truly cross-platform in how it was developed, which can remain local to one’s own computer (with data stored ONLY on the desktop), but which behaves like a web app in that it can seamlessly update itself without risk of data-breach?

Ray Rippey mentioned (above) that the desktop will never really go away, and that people will make distinctions between when they can use a web app, and when they can’t. How many people agree with this? Enough to make it worth the expense, effort and maintenance of building a desktop app?

And just to make it interesting, maybe you have a point of view on the notion (which i have stumbled over repeatedly, though i still don’t understand how/why this can be true) that web-hosted data is safer than data stored locally on one’s own computer at home.

thanks so much.
warmest,
tamira

Paul Woodford

Personally, I would LOVE to see more integration of IM in my web-based apps. ANY collaboration-enabled app should also include IM.

That being said, I have a few (too many perhaps) widgets in my Google homepage, and as it updates, it slows w a a y y y down. So many calls back to the Google mothership or some other api or another. Web-based apps greatest strength is the sharing that can take place over a network, but they have that very same achille’s heel of being slave to it as well.

Personally, I’m big into the web for customizing my incoming information. I also think the web is great for bringing a new vector of competition to entrenched desktop applications. So far for a number of applications, I still prefer my trusty local executables and data, but that will change as features and interfaces improve and get more integrated.

In our company, we have employees across the US and in Latin America, so Web Apps are really important to us. We use WebEx for all of our calendar and time tracking needs and our company created an email management tool to address handling large amounts of role-based email.

Great blog, BTW. We link to it for our customer releated blog at emailmanagement.blogspot.com.

It’s not clear to me that Google will be able to improve these apps enough to be useful in their current html/javascript technology. Perhaps they will do a Flash/Flex version of Docs and Spreadsheets someday to get some richness into these apps…

And they sure don’t want to have to worry about their store shutting down because of a problem with their ISP or a cable.

I have noticed some apps on the web are getting very sophisticated. And for certain apps the web is the only place to be.

But the desktop has it’s place, and I believe a balance will be struck at a certain point to where people will understand when they should have a desktop app or a web app.

I for one don’t trust putting my customers personal data on the internet, even though I put my info out there all the time. Can you imagine a rental store that rents adult video’s and they tell their customers they are being stored on the net!

No, the desktop isn’t going the way of the dodo bird anytime soon IMHO.

I recently reinstalled my OS on my home PC and I did not install an IM client or an office suite. Instead I’m using Google Docs for word processing and Meebo for IMs. I am wondering how long I can go before I do someething that requires me to install one of those two kinds of applications onto my desktop.