Thursday, October 25, 2007

Why Lots of Hard Drive Space is Obsolete

About two years ago, Bill Gates published a "Sea Change" memo. He does this to refocus Microsoft on a particular priority. With one of these memos in 1995, he focused the company on the importance of leveraging the Internet in its software. In 2002, he published another memo to focus the company on software security.

I remember when this memo came out. I was working at Ensynch (a Microsoft partner) and this memo sparked a lot of excitement in the Microsoft community. It's funny how long it can take for something like this to be adopted in the general population.

It's now 2007 -- two years after this memo was released. I realized today that I no longer use any local programs on my computer. To clarify, a local program is a piece of software that you install on your computer -- you can access it usually on- or offline and the information is stored on your hard drive. Internet access is so ubiquitous now that everything I do now is accomplished online:
  • Write documents
  • Manage my finances
  • Play games
  • Network with friends
The term that's been coined for this shift in how I use software is called "Software as a Service" or SaaS. I didn't realize how useful this model of online software is until my imminent departure from DelCor. In my last job, I had to make sure I deleted a lot of personal files so that my information remained secure. When I leave DelCor tomorrow, I won't have to do this because all the personal stuff that I did while in my office resides online.

This way of using software also proves beneficial in extending the lifespan of my PC. I no longer have to worry about system requirements, hard drive space, etc with my relatively older machine. As long as I can still use Firefox on the computer, I can accomplish all my tasks through the Web.

Five Sites to Get you Started with SaaS:
  • Google Docs: Think of this as a free version of Microsoft Office. It has a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. Everything I could do on a local program (except the most advanced Word features), I can do through this.
  • Gmail: There is really no reason that you should be using any other email program. Threaded email, archiving instead of deletion, and search instead of sort. Everything's stored online.
  • Mint: Think of this as an online Quicken. Aggregates all your financial data (kind of scary...) into one site for you.
  • Picnik/Flickr: Edit your photos online with Picnik and then upload, tag, and share them on Flickr.
SaaS is without a doubt, the future of software -- expect to be charged for the use of some programs in the future as well.

Do you have any other favorite SaaS sites? Share them in the comments.

21 comments:

Tyeson said...

If you think SaaS is starting to hit it's stride, you should have been at the Microsoft WPC in Denver. Ballmer threw everyone a curveball spending most of his time talking about "Software plus services". There was a lot of thinly veiled detail about what seemed like plans for Microsoft to partner with regional data centers to offer hosted services up the ying yang. An immenent threat to regional managed service providers (unless they have managed services expertise that can't be easily duplicated because the intricacy of true managed services, particularly in a facility owned by someone else makes barriers to entry nearly insurmountable). If you know what I'm talking about...and I think you do Fresh Marketer. Anyway, just wanted to post a comment to get the ball rolling. Post something about the Google phone.

Dan Schreibstein said...

Hey Tyeson -- thanks for the comment. I remember hearing about Microsoft's possible future attempt to undercut regional MSPs. Seems to me that they're not too loyal to their partner community -- they have already started competing with their partners directly in the professional services department...

TheComputerExpertSays said...

Dan -

I have been in the IT business since the late 70s. I have seen the entire PC industry and I have owned everything from a PC/XT, 286, 386 on up. I have used all of Microsoft's operating systems and I have witnessed all of the growth and changes in the PC industry.

And, I have come to this conclusion. Microsoft has single-handedly killed the PC industry. There was a time (before Microsoft got so heavily into the application development business) when there were 100,000s of programs for the PC. We had choices and the innovations were exciting. The demand for more powerful CPUs was driven by bigger and more demanding applications and the faster CPUs, hard drives, etc created a platform for advancing applications. But now Microsoft has killed innovation. The best analogy to an open, free market technical product is the cell phone. Look how exciting that industry is! Well, that is how it used to be with PCs in the late 80s. Alas, no more.

My point is that Microsoft has been resisting SaaS because that would eliminate Windows as the operating system. Having browser-based applications is the future. It always has been and it should be waaaay farther along than it is. But SaaS would open up the whole PC market to all developers and innovators and that could cripple Microsoft. So, I am hopeful that it is happening. But we are still a long way and Microsoft will continue to stifle innovation.

The solution? Microsoft needs to be tamed. I think they should be split up... Applications from Operating Systems. Create two separate companies. Then Google and the rest of the world can fairly compete for this next wave of productivity.

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