Desktop R.I.P? Don't Count on It!

There is an interesting article in this month's Wired with the title, Desktop R.I.P. The argument goes that as more people use applications like Google, Yahoo Mail, Flickr, SalesForce, etc. the need for a desktop will go away and that we'll all live in this Internet-based world where we can have a virtual desktop sitting on some hosted server or servers.

Personally, I don't think this is going to happen for a number of reasons:

1. Hosted applications are fundamentally rented software. In most cases, the rent also scales with the load, e.g. number of users, number of transactions, etc. While this is also true with desktop/server software (maintenance fees, upgrade fees, etc.) there is typically more flexibility in options.

2. Hosted cloud based applications are a return to the "dumb-terminal" concept that has been thrown around and largely rejected for the past 30 years. Why have a $1500 machine on your desk when all it does is act like a green-screen terminal? The PC revolution over the past 20-30 years has shown that having some local hardware makes a huge impact on the experience of software.

3. There are large software segments that will never go cloud, for example games. Do you think that Electronic Arts is going to be creating the equivalent of Google Desktop anytime soon?

4. Desktops are cheap. Servers are expensive. I can buy a desktop for $1199 at MDG. The equivalent Dell server is about $3600, albeit with better power management, smaller footprint, etc. However, in general the economic models don't make much sense - why give up a cheap, non-redundant client and push all that computing to highly redundant servers that are double or triple the price for the equivalent power?

In addition, desktops are getting cheaper. If the economic engine was that desktops were getting more expensive, then a hosted model could come in as a low-cost alternative. But desktops get cheaper every year and in the case of mobile devices, video game consoles, etc. they're subsidized. So why throw away all that local computing power?

5. The desktop is no longer a single desktop - a desktop is now a TV appliance, a mobile phone, a traditional desktop, an XBOX 360, a kiosk, etc. While it is possible to boil all these down to a browser based experience, the experience is pretty lack-luster and compromises the power of these devices in their local context.

Forget desktops - just look at your blackberry and compare your blackberry email built into the client vs. going to mobile.msn.com on your WAP browser. Which one would you choose?

6. Your data sitting on someone else's servers - for the majority of killer apps, this is a non-starter, especially if the data is in the United States. If you host your CRM data in a US data centre, you've now exposed your entire customer database to the reach of the Patriot Act.

So I think the idea of the desktop death watch is premature at best. In fact, it was supposed to die a while ago with the network computer. The Network Computer was supposed to kill the desktop in the mid-90s. The exact same vision as Google's - why have that expensive desktop running local apps when you could replace with a terminal and run everything in the cloud (and of course pay Oracle/Sun a fee for it). Oracle and Sun in the mid 90's were the Google of today - they had publicly declared war on Microsoft and used the exact same arguments - Windows is too expensive, too flaky, too hard to maintain, etc. so just give up on desktops and move to the cloud where everything will be secure, cheap, etc.

How many Network Computers do you see kicking around today?