Have we reached the end of desktop OS development? | Hacker News Reader

Have we reached the end of desktop OS development?

gibsonandlily.com

18 pointsblhack18 comments

Nope. Shortsighted. A better analogy might be "hi-fi" audio. We reached a level of audio quality that the majority of people are basically happy with some decades ago. (I'm talking about amplification and transduction here.) What "progress" we've made in the meantime that hasn't had to do with new formats (both in the sense of media/input format and output format) has had mostly to do with making sound amplification and transduction more convenient. So big stacks of components are now tending to disappear into convenient all-in-one forms. A very high-level diagram of this progression could be:

    Innovation -> Optimization -> Standardization -> Convenience

With audio, standardization was instrumental in optimization. Since one could swap-out their crappy amplifier for a better one, standardization enabled competition in audio components. So perhaps these are better represented as happening together.

In the convenience phase, standardization doesn't go away. It just becomes invisible to the end user.

Seen this way, it's obvious that there's a lot of desktop development left to do, even if OS are already seen as commodity, just like audio equipment became commodity decades ago, but still came in rather inconvenient forms. A lot of the desktop experience is still quite far from being completely seamless. Users still have to be aware that one program does their IMs, another does stuff on the web. Yet another might be used to publish their blog. Another one lets them read PDFs. Another lets them edit their photos. It's just like the 80s and 90s when a lot of people still had to puzzle over the manuals and plug dozens of cords to hook up the 4 or 5 components of their home theater. (Instead of buying some all-in-one thing and just plugging in 6. Soon, it may get to the point where no one plugs in anything at all on their home theater, except to power outlets.)

I'll agree. That was sortof the point of the last paragraph...

Right now (to use your analogy), Microsoft is trying to sell us bigger and better pre-amps while everybody is buying all-in-wonder digital systems.

Everything is getting smaller (netbooks, smartphones like the iPhone and the Android), but Microsoft is about to release another OS with a HUGE hardware investment required in order to even run it. (edit: I was totally wrong about this. The hardware requirement for windows 7 can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7#Hardware_requirements and is rather minimal).

I was wrong to say "the end of desktop development"...more the end of an era or desktop OS development. Microsoft doesn't seem to get this (yet).

"HUGE hardware investment required in order to even run it."

With win 7 that's not really the case, it runs pretty well even on older computers.

There has always been the minimum requirement that Micrsoft listed, but what are the real minimum requirements?

Answer: No, we didn't.

In my opinion, the desktop apps are still needed, and part of the future will be applications like Evernote, where your data are on the cloud and online version is available, but there are also native rich clients for various platform, like mobile phones, or, well, desktop.

Basically, for every application where I produce my own data and use it often, I welcome having both the online version and a desktop client. Even if the desktop client is only a bit quicker, it add ups over time.

For example, people are bragging how Google Docs does it for them, but I use desktop Office software, and then sync my files using the cloud with Live Mesh. Simply, the desktop client is still more convenient, and the "syncing" element can be solved outside the client.

In the next year when Microsoft Office will be integrated with cloud, there will be both desktop software AND online version available. That I think is the future, and the desktop apps will be a part of that.

A comment to the dvd/blueray and modern technology: my kids prefer VHS tapes to DVDs since they know DVDs get scratched and have never had problems with VHS tapes. Of course they are only 4,6 and 8, but still they see the problems with modern technology that I have just ignored or just carefully avoided.

Ehm. Whatever problems you may have with DVDs. Compared to VHS they are superior in every regard.

Well, we have a 22" CRT TV and an average DVD player, and when using netflix or library borrowed DVDs we commonly have periods when it freezes, blocks, etc. VHS allows one to watch a film albeit with less quality for the entire time w/o thinking about the fast forwarding to get out of this "bad" spot. My two cents. And btw, I am not an audio/video freak, thus the high definition stuff is lost on me.

I find DVDs incredibly annoying, and never could use them. Mainly because I was so used to the ability to remove VHS tapes, put them aside, and re-play them from the exact position with zero wait time. That's fixable on DVDs (I imagine) but not on my player.

DVD FBI warnings, animations, menus, etc, are all pointless and (usually) unavoidable.

The weird thing about DVDs was the ENORMOUS marketing push for them when they came out. The industry was desperate to transition to this medium, for clear reasons:

1. To get everyone to re-buy their favorite movies.

2. Better copy protection.

3. Cheaper production.

There was very little for the consumer, but he fell for it. By contrast, the ancient (late 1970s) analogue Laserdiscs were genuinely better than anything else, but didn't work out.

Really? I can't carry around a VHS in my laptop bag and watch the VHS in my laptop whenever I want it. So, from my perspective, as someone who's never owned a TV other than his computer, VHSes are almost completely useless. Of course, a usb flash drive is much preferable to a DVD...

Your comment is unrelated to mine. I am speaking in the context of home viewership. This is frankly quite obvious, but whatever.

I agree that desktop OS vendors are out of touch with their users and that the browser is the most important app on your computer (for some people it's basically the only app). However, how can that possibly mean "the end of desktop OS development"? To me, that says that there is a ton of room for future OS development.

"Native apps" still get a lot more support from desktop OSes than web apps. If web apps are taking over, this needs to change. In fact, the distinction between native apps and web apps needs to disappear. All apps will involve some amount of client-side data/computation and some amount of server-side. The OS needs to change to acknowledge that.

There's plenty of desktop OS development left for the future.

The "cloud" isn't fast enough.

Until most everyone can access files in the cloud as fast as a local NFS connection over 1G ethernet, and do so consistently, desktop apps are here to stay. I view the suggestion that web based photo management apps and editors are(will be) "just as good" as their desktop counterparts for "ordinary" folks with the same suspicion that I view the claims that GIMP is just as good as photoshop or OpenOffice is a suitable replacement for Word/Excel. Not likely...

I think the desktop is critical as a system-integration point for users. I find it hard to integrate the silos of web apps, but on my desktop I can drag-and-drop from one app to another. At least on the Mac, many desktop apps are really good at integrating with the OS, which means they integrate well with each other.

The idea of buying an entire half hour of The Family Guy to promote the launch of Windows 7 is interesting.

But imagine the remixes.

If you read HN, you already wrote this in blog post years ago.

Probably without using periods for whitespace.

The point was the Microsoft is releasing what is going to be another failure due to their ignorance about what people are using their computers for. Have you heard the ads? "I created a photo album on windows 7!" Did you? Are you sure you didn't just upload 100 photos to facebook and tag your family members in them?

Also, the periods for whitespaces are because of the way that markdown (which is what the site uses) deals with newlines.

A browser is a desktop application

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