There are some pretty bold statements in that article…
We can safely proclaim that desktop is almost dead by now. Only games and heavy apps are keeping it alive.
If that were true, I could write a book from my iPad or my iPhone — I can't. Sure, Pages has online features, and collaborative features, but it's still not a replacement for me.
However, web development was not mature enough to replicate power of HyperCard or Access. We suddenly lost all advances in desktop software development and had to start almost from scratch.
This is an interesting point. I don't know that I necessarily agree. My experience with HyperCard was not good. We had Flash though. Now we have Hype, but it hasn't caught on like Flash.
I do feel like the Internet is trying to find a direction. The Internet had to be restarted because of mobile devices. That's why modern design is so plain. People are still figuring out how to make a website pretty across all devices. But also, the Internet is meant to be quick. People don't care about flashy animation, not like the landing pages of the 90s. They just want to search for their information and get back to their cat videos.
Internet powered collaboration software. You can write documents together,
Do people actually do this?
The general tone of the article makes sense, that work will move online and that people will work collaboratively. However, I see problems with this... BIG PROBLEMS.
Fragmentation — Which tool to you use? Google Docs? Office 365? iCloud? That cool tool by that cool startup? Getting people to agree on the tool can almost immediately kill collaboration.
Learning Curve — Even if you settle on the tool, one guy in the group is going to email the document. Or what about the freelancer, he doesn't have a company account? How do we create an account for him? A simple sounding problem, that can be surprisingly difficult.
Expensive — Right now in this space, big companies are spending big money to be the leader. That will fix the fragmentation issue, but then you're at the mercy of an uncompetitive market. What's to stop the price from rising when there's no competition?
Practicality — Hype is mainly a tool for soloists. What if tomorrow morning, Hype suddenly had collaboration features. Would you use them? How would that work exactly? What if there was an option to buy Hype the online version, but it's a monthly subscription. How many people would switch?
I don't like to rent my software. That's one of the primary reasons why I'm here. But for online collaboration, someone has to pay for the servers. Clearly, many companies are trying to change that business model. More and more apps are going to the "cloud".
It's kinda like replacing cable, with the streaming mess that we have now.