We need to start the feature race over again
There have been lots of predictions of online versions of desktop apps. What has been missing is a valid justification for people to move from Microsoft Office to an online set of apps. One unrecognized benefit will be the restarting of the feature race all over again. I just set up a new copy of Quicken so I could help my mother with her checkbook and the level of complexity is overwhelming. I just wanted to do simple checkbook balancing but the software acts as if I want to set up my own online brokerage house. I had the same experience the other day when I started building the system to manage this blog. I'm coding it myself with FoxPro at first and then I'll move it to MySQL and probably Ruby. All I wanted to start with was a simple flat file database of my posts, but FoxPro, Access and all the other supposedly end-user databases were so feature rich that I was faced with studying manuals just to create a form to add and edit records. A new generation of web based apps will have to start at the beginning of the feature curve and maybe some of them will stay simple enough to be used by non-power users. I don't mind programming and I like lots of features when I need them, but the current packaged software model requires publishers to constantly add features until they can do everything every competitor does. Hopefully the web model for apps will allow for different levels of complexity.
