Another Ajax replacement for an existing application

I’ve watched Michael Robertson since he started the Lindows business. Now it appears that in addition to his SIP / VoIP stuff, he’s launching a series of Ajax-based applications to replace desktop applications. The first is ajaxWrite.

I was working for an innovative blade server company (Xyterra) in Scottsdale Arizona when I first ran across Lindows. Back in 2000, we were betting on Linux as the standard OS for our server development. Linux wasn’t new, but using it as a hardened OS for telecommunications infrastructure was new.

Ajax is cool. Dynamic web applications that are lightweight and improve the user experience on the web are cool. I’m not sure the percentage of the market that will switch from desktop application to web delivery, but I see a big benefit for the college market. In fact, today’s campuses offer computer labs with pre-configured network storage and a suite of applications that configure themselves to each student. A web hosted environment may be a whole lot simpler to manage for the IT organization. And students could use the same applications the same way on any computer.

One big downside…no web connectivity. Someone in the space has to think about mobilized application uses. Perhaps these use environments will simply be the “old” model of fat desktop software. Is there a place for offline use of Ajax / Web 2.0 functionality? I love the concept. Wonder what the market size and possibility for revenue.

Comments

2 Responses to “Another Ajax replacement for an existing application”

  1. Julien Couvreur on April 3rd, 2006 1:30 pm

    You may be interested in a sample online/offline AJAX demo that I put together. It’s a wiki that can be loaded when disconnected, relying on the browser cache and Flash (v8) persistent storage.

    Check it out: http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000272.html

    Support for disconnected operations in web application is possible, but it’s still a lot of work and requires some browser extensions.

  2. Julien Couvreur on April 3rd, 2006 1:32 pm

    Oh, forgot something: I have no idea of the market size neither, but I’d love to have some numbers. It seems like there are still many online-offline scenarios today (since we haven’t quite reached the anywherenet stage), so there should be a need…