Is the World Ready for a Web-Based Desktop?

With today's broadband speeds, software applications as services kinda sucks. I know. I use SAAS every day to create Web content, and I curse that I'm not able to build the page locally and upload it, instead waiting, waiting, waiting, for windows to open in Firefox whenever I place art, more items, etc.

But it is cheap and easy -- no local applications to break or need upgrades.

The only thing good about a virtual desktop is having your settings go with you to any computer through which you access them.

But none of this will be anything but painful until broadband speeds get much, much quicker. Like 200 times quicker.

On the other hand, look at Google Docs. For what it does -- manipulate text documents -- it's pretty seamless. It works very quckly, saves ALL THE TIME so you don't have to. The only problem: You can't print on real paper with the same precision that you get from a dedicated word processor. And you have to tweak the browser to do it.

So SAAS is the future, but it's easier to trumpet that if you don't have to suffer through the vagaries of broadband speeds as they exist in the U.S. today.

> With today's broadband speeds, software applications as services kinda sucks.

You also have to remember that there are large portions of the population still stuck with dialup. Broadband is still not available to large sections of the country. DSL only became available here about 20 months ago.

Quoting:So SAAS is the future, but it's easier to trumpet that if you don't have to suffer through the vagaries of broadband speeds as they exist in the U.S. today.

Or Australia, and I assume pretty much anywhere, except, maybe, some of the Asian countries

Even if you DO have broadband there is no guarantee it's hard wired broadband. Really puts the kibosh on latency when you have to go through a satellite, I shudder to think what the dial up folks around me have to go through as even my "broadband" runs at around 1200ms latency on the average. And the folks I work for are thinking of converting to the SAAS model, luckily all their experiments so far have fallen flat on their face, even hosting the solutions themselves.