robscherer.com

Following on from my recent post about Photoshop moving online, I read this great post on Joel Spolsky’s site. Joel asserts that the new API is HTML and that the Windows API is in trouble. His premise is this;

• People buy an operating system because of the applications they can run on it
• People buy Windows because you can run a great variety of apps on it
• People don’t buy Mac’s or Sun’s not because they are inferior operating systems but because of the limited apps available

I definitely agree with that. I have resisted buying a Mac for a long time because I know what Windows apps work for me. I am now seriously considering buying a Mac with an Intel chip and BootCamp. Best of both worlds hey?

When this new and exciting arena of rich web apps matures, what will Microsoft’s competitive advantage be? It won’t be that their OS has the most applications written for it.

When Mac users and Linux users and Sun users are able to access the same software online as Windows users, people will pay more attention to the features, stability and security of the OS than they will to the variety of software that was written for that platform.

Further, it seems logical that developers will embrace the cross platform HTML API in order to increase their reach and OS compatibility.

Whether the application is built in Ajax or Flash or some other technology is irrelevant, although I do agree with Jeff Atwood that JavaScript will become more popular on the grounds that that is where the lions share of the development community is working.

The new uTorrent web interface is a great example of the power of Ajax to avail the core features of a desktop app online. It’s lacking a bit of polish and all of the features of the desktop version but it lets you get the job done!