Am I the only one that doesn't see the appeal of those desktop-in-a-browser websites?
Most of the 500M people that access the web via a cybercafe only are going to be in 3rd world countries, using something like Win98 + IE4 over a dial-up line shared by 10 machines. Oh, and paying in 10-minute increments. A Flash or AJAX based desktop analog is not going to have a hard time to work there.
There is indeed a potential market there, but you need to work with the grain of the Web to make it work. Desktop in a browser is going against the grain in my opinion.
But how long have these desktop-like websites been around for now? I remember Hotmail catching on like mad in their first months of being available. Not so much with the WebOS sites as far as I know.
Mind you, I'm not saying that web-based take-your-info-anywhere web apps will never succeed (heck, people are using Hotmail and Gmail as storage, so the need is certainly there). It's just that I don't think that mimicking a WIMP desktop is the way to go.
Most of the 500M people that access the web via a cybercafe only are going to be in 3rd world countries, using something like Win98 + IE4 over a dial-up line shared by 10 machines. Oh, and paying in 10-minute increments. A Flash or AJAX based desktop analog is not going to have a hard time to work there.
There is indeed a potential market there, but you need to work with the grain of the Web to make it work. Desktop in a browser is going against the grain in my opinion.