You knew it was going to happen. I’m talking about a web page that I discovered called ThinkFree Office online. It’s the most advanced online office suite that I’ve ever seen on the internet. It emulates Microsoft Office where you can open, edit, create PDF’s. Everything that Microsoft Office can do it can do BUT it’s completely and uterly on the internet. No installing any software on your hard drive in any way. It runs totally in your internet browser. It even emulates the look and feel of Office to a "t" so that if you’re familiar with Word (for example) you can open up ThinkFree and begin working immediately without skipping a beat. So far, it only works in Internet Explorer (blah) and is still in beta stage but promises to add support to all the other browsers really soon. That’s right, software moves to the internet. Pretty soon, we won’t have any software that resides on our hard drive. It will all exist in cyberspace. 
Of course, it has its good sides and bad sides. The good is upgrades, of course. Everyone will be using the same version everywhere because all the upgrades will be handled from whomever maintains the online software. Another good thing is that you can grab your documents and edit them anywhere you can get on the internet. The bad things is that if your internet is down… no worky (unless you can somehow use a off-line version somehow). That and it gives less control to the user. I think it’s a pretty neat idea when all the kinks get worked out but for right now. Go to http://online.thinkfree.com/ (make sure you’re using IE when you activate the applet). Also, check out http://www.writely.com. Same kind of thing but multiple people can be working on the same document at the same time (sweet concept). Be watching… more and more of these programs are going to be coming out. Pretty soon, we’ll have online Photoshop, online Access and others. Right now, all of them are free but who knows what’s going to happen when they get out of the beta (testing) stage.The more advanced the internet gets and the faster we can access it the more things move to it. It’s inevitable.
Oh, by the way, if anyone likes free quality software, check out this list.
And no, not all of my blogs are going to be geeky like this one. Just wanted to share some of my thoughts.
0 Responses to “The future of software…”