Browsers as operating systems

Last week, Google released Google Apps. This is a set of tools aimed at getting small businesses talking. The suite of apps includes Google Talk, Gmail and Google Calendar. Rumours on the Internet suggest that they will soon be adding their newly acquired word processing package Writely to the line up. This suite will be free and move Google into direct competition with Microsoft for one of their biggest cash cows, Office (which is going ‘live’ in 2007, meaning all sorts of online collaborative features will be built into the industry standard application suite).

This is all well and good – Google and Microsoft are constantly in the press trying to get one up on the other. What’s more interesting however is the move to online services that replace features traditionally reserved for the desktop computer or, at the very most, an office Intranet.

By releasing it’s Apps suite, Google is suggesting that there is little need for desktop applications that comes in a box and sit on your machine. Companies like Zoho agree. Their online package of apps allows users to work on a range of office applications all through a browser screen. It’s true to say that the experience isn’t quite up to the level of the applications that sit on your hard drive, but, technologies like AJAX and ever faster broadband connections are improving the user experience dramatically. It doesn’t stop there. Companies are offering users the ability to store all their data online – Flickr will do it for you photo’s, YouTube your videos and All My Data – well, it pretty much explains itself!

The same is happening in other areas of the digital market as well. Where Sky+ dominates in the ‘anytime’ PVR market, start-ups like Homechoice are showing that, instead of hundreds of hard drives in hundreds of houses, collecting them in one room dedicated to the task is not only possible, but a viable financial business model. Why spend all that money on your iTunes collection when you can have fully customised, user rated music delivered to you by Last FM? As for games – well, you can play 3D action adventures via a webpage that load faster than a Playstation game.

The value proposition of these services is they take the processing and storage effort off the home/office computer away and offer constantly updatable services. As long as the exchange of data between computer and server is fast enough, almost any task you do can be performed anywhere in the world and the results fed back to you.

How the consumer will react to this model is hard to say. On the one hand it makes good sense – off load expensive and bulky hardware to a dedicated server, sit back in front of a screen and get on with the task in hand. If your service breaks down, you can rest assured there will be experts looking at the problem straight away. On the other hand, how will people feel when all of their files are stored remotely? Google already searches through email text to offer a targeted advertisement, which is spooky enough – imagine if all your digital life was scanned and you were advertised to accordingly? I know I would feel a little uneasy!

The technologies that deliver these services are still in their infancy, but the innovation is gaining momentum. It does make you wonder why the Bill’s and Steve’s of this world bother spending their time telling us about the best operating systems. Who’s going to care? In the future it could be all about the browser. It may just make computers a little bit more personal!