Consumers Only Using Browser Based Software

Posted by Jeff Lu on April 8, 2009

By Scott Rosenberg

I was on Killerstartup.com today and the first company OrSiSo.com sounded interesting so I decided to watch a video about the product on the company’s website.  In short,  they are a social media aggregation platform, sort of like friendfeed but better.  I forwarded the link to my coworker and I told him about the merits of the product.

Now you would think that the very next thing I did was use the product… but I didn’t because there was a problem.  The product was absolutely free but I was still unwilling to use it because I had to DOWNLOAD it.  I informed my coworker of this minor detail and his response was, “oh, in that case it’s not very interesting”.

Cloud computing has definitely affected myself and other consumers more than we realize.  I can remember that not too long ago, I was installing winamp to play my music, and AOL to chat and email.  Moore’s law applied to infrastructure and software’s innovative use of that advance in hardware has transformed software for consumers and enterprises alike.  I now sign onto gmail and simultaneously get my mail and chat with my friends without installing additional hardware, all for free.  I can now listen to streaming music from my friend’s tumblr while I write this entry on wordpress software without ever having to pay for or download any additional software.

It’s come to the point where, if the only barrier between consumers using free great software is to download and install it onto their PC, that barrier is too high.  Netbooks have seen enormous growth in sales, as sales for high powered laptops and PC’s have slumped because more computer power is done in the back-end so consumers no longer need high powered computers to enjoy content and software.

As I was writing this post, I was reminded of Scott Rosenberg’s book “Dreaming In Code”.  In it, he talks about 80′s and early 90′s where hardware and infrastructure was lagging behind software however, due to Moore’s Law and the Mythical Man-Month currently hardware has outpaced software.  This is demonstrated by Rosenberg’s account of Mitch Kapor’s Chandler project, a grandiose endeavor to make a product better than Outlook.  In the middle of their turbulent path for transcendent software, Google came out with a new dynamic computer language (AJAX) and a new product that beat them to the punch: GMail and Google Docs.  The best part was, none of Google’s software needed to be downloaded.

I bring up this case study in software history because it’s awesome to see how spoiled Internet consumers have become by looking back on where we came from. It’s also useful to realize that the next wave of innovation is going to come from truly innovative software that harnesses the, now relatively cheap, power of hardware and IT infrastructure.