Re: Web vs. Desktop based systems

On May 25, 11:12 am, rem6...@xxxxxxxxx (Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t)
wrote:
From: gabriel...@xxxxxxxxx
I have to graduate for my master in Business Information
Management and need to do a survey for my thesis. The thesis is
about Web vs. Desktop based applications and the differences
perceived by the user. So not from the management/technology point
of view but from the end-user. I focus now on Desktop vs. Webmail

If you want to run a desktop application, you must first find a
version that will run on your particular computer and operating
system, then study the conditions under which you'd be allowed to
use it (for example: freeware, shareware, free-trial of crippled
version, or can't even try it until after you pay for it). Then you
must download it or otherwise get it onto your computer. Then you
must install and configure it. Finally you can try using it. If it
doesn't work, you've wasted all that effort getting it. If it
requires a fifty-gigabyte database to make any reasonable use of
it, then you need to buy a fifty-gigabyte hard disk before you can
even install it, and it may take a week to download the entire
database. (For example, has *anyone* successfully downloaded the
*entire* Google Groups archive, or even the most recent ten years
of it, so that they could run the GG search engine as a desktop
application?) You have to repeat that process of finding compatible
version and getting and installing for *each* program you *ever*
run even once as a desktop application. If you tried to download
all the software that exists that would run on your computer, just
so you'd have it all avaiable any time you needed it, you'd need a
hard disk bigger than anything you can afford. And if you want to
use the software from multiple locations, such as home and work,
you must carry your computer with immense hard disk around with
you, which might not be easy.

By comparison with Web-based services, the whole InterNet is a
single distributed computer system at your disposal anywhere you
can find a Web browser, which is virtually everywhere the InterNet
is available, which is nearly everywhere in the world. You don't
even need to carry your computer with Web browser around with you,
because just about any old Web browser you find anywhere will do
almost as well as any other.

That's a lovely theory. In real life, it's not at all uncommon to hit
sites that say "Please install Internet Explorer to see our site" and
provide a helpful link to a Microsoft download page that doesn't have
a usable version for my system. It's also not uncommon to find sites
that require Flash, Java, or other plugins--and even want you to
upgrade versions over the one you have installed. And in practice a
lot of common sites manage to render incorrectly or hang the browser
completely based on arcane .

If it requires a fifty-gigabyte database to make any reasonable use of
it, then you need to buy a fifty-gigabyte hard disk before you can
even install it, and it may take a week to download the entire
database.

The flip side is that your data is kept on your machine with desktop
apps, which can be particularly important for data that you want to
keep private. And with, say, local email you can easily switch from
one email program to another (assuming they use the same storage
format, which is pretty common in my experience) and have all your
messages just show up properly in the new system--if you switch
webmail providers, you often lose all your messages or have to
somewhat painfully forward everything to the new accont.

And you always get the latest public
version of any Web-based application. If there's a bug, and
it gets fixed, you can use the fixed version right away.

Which is often unfortunate, as new versions often introduce new
showstopper bugs when the old version worked perfectly well; with
desktop apps, you're not forced to upgrade if what you have is working
well to your tastes. With web apps, you're at the mercy of the people
on the other end as to when you upgrade.

Even if there aren't killer bugs, you can often run into an update at
an inconvenient time--you _really_ need to get something done today,
and the interface has all changed. Whereas with desktop apps you can
time the upgrades to be much less intrusive.

The main disadvantage of Web-based serverside software is that you
can't get live animated action that way.

You can do some primitive stuff with AJAX, but basically that's true--
I wouldn't call it the main disadvantage, but that's really a question
of taste.

.

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