Posts tagged as: desktop

Windows Live, part 2

I went back to the Windows Live website today to try out some of the user created gadgets and discovered that some of the sillier bugs have been fixed. Coincidence? I could hope that this is just the normal bug fixing process, but the bugs that were fixed had been there for at least two weeks before I wrote about them. Anyway, this was an encouraging sign, so I went on to look at what users had been able to contribute to Microsoft's collection of gadgets. It isn't fair to talk about bugs with these gadgets, since they are not produced by Microsoft, so I decided to see what type of apps were popular and how it felt running them on the Windows Live browser desktop.

Let me stop here for a second. What are we supposed to call the simulated desktop when it appears in a browser? The help file for Live refers to it as my "page." So I guess they are thinking of this as a home page builder, not a web based desktop. It would make sense for Microsoft to adopt this terminology, but I want to remember to track what Live's competitors call it. I can see how this is going to be confusing when this stuff gets rolled out to the general public. How do you parse statements like "Now you can move your desktop to a Web desktop."? A quick check of Technorati shows that bloggers are indeed trying to construct sentences like this. Thank God, I'm not still working in a dot-com. I can just imagine a meeting with marketing people trying to decide how to unravel this verbal knot we have tied around ourselves. Remind me to tell you someday about the time Andover.Net marketing people came up with the slogan "Fat and Sticky."

Can you tell I don't really want to get to these gadgets? OK. Let's talk about the great stuff people have built. One of the first things I liked is the use of a tag cloud to select gadgets. From the intro text it looks like they're pretty damn pleased with themselves about it too. Another cool thing is the fact that someone posted a Firefox download gadget two months ago, and its still there. It is also one of the most downloaded gadgets.

Alright, I'll admit that I can't find any really great gadgets. But there are some cute ones (click Install Gadget to view gadget):

• Financial Clock.
• Boise Traffic Map. Make up your own joke.
• Chord Finger.
• Live Math.

Overall, this system seems to hold some promise. If it can become cool to build gadgets, I think we might see some useful ones. I am surprised, however, that Microsoft hasn't appeared to commit any resources to developing killer gadgets of their own. Maybe they are waiting to see what users create first so they can copy them.

Why does this feel like integrated software all over again?

I know that I keep hyping the idea of webapps, but an article on Ajax desktops in Publish magazine leaves me wondering how many people actually want such a product. They remind me of the integrated product craze that flared up in the early to mid-Eighties. It was felt by many users and software designers that only being able to run one program at a time was a major limitation of PC-DOS, the dominant operating system of the time. Many software companies started working on the problem of running multiple PC applications simultaneously, and we all know how this story turns out. Some of the companies, however, decided that as long as they were allowing word processors, spreadsheets and databases to work together, they might as well try to sell people new versions of these applications. The users declined this offer and chose to run Windows and individual products for each app.

Software designers always underestimate the desire of users to run individual products for separate tasks. I'm afraid these web desktops will allow me to tie together a collection of mediocre apps, and I'm supposed to be impressed because I can move windows around on a page. I already can move windows around on my screen, that's why its called Windows. There seems to be a fundamental rule that a software company can make a few great products, but nobody can build a collection of best of breed products. Inevitably users choose the unbundled model for greater choice. But to be fair, I'll give each of the seven sites listed in the article a try and report back. I am curious to see just how GUI a webapp can be.