During the last few years software development has taken a completely different direction, we used to look for softwares as stand-alone applications, search for what is compatible with our operating systems and what’s really affordable for us to buy, now things have changed dramatically, everything is getting “webified”, things that we never expected to be online became now a regular online use.
The software market moved from being a stand-alone application market into a hosted web application market, not even a web application market, instead of just selling the web application as a script, software companies preferred to keep the script in-house and leasing it as a hosted service for a modest monthly rate, clients are no longer required to have a server to host their web applications, users don’t have to install any new softwares, they all can have it hosted and maintained by software providers themselves.
This new concept has exploded a really big boom, a lot of new buzzwords are showing up everyday and a completely new market has been created too, all under the umbrella of the main buzzword behind all of this, the one we all hear many times a day, it’s Web2.0.
The Positives
The webification move is positive for both clients and software providers, for clients it reduced the need for a higher resources and this “System Requirements” stuff, all information are portable now and available online all the time, all what the user need is an internet connection with a decent browser to enter his online world of web apps accounts, no matter what operating system or even what’s the machine used to access it.
For software providers webifing their applications has solved many old problems, like support and upgrades, with desktop applications they had to contact each customer for an upgrade and when a bug fix is released it had to be sent to all customers, but now when their application is a web hosted service, they have full control over the software that everybody is using at the same time, they can upgrade, fix and maintain everything from one single place, it has reduced the total delivery cost.
The internet got a completely new face with this new concept, and many problems got solved and really simplified, there are many articles and blog posts about the advantages so I won’t go any longer with them, I prefer to talk a little about the negatives as I didn’t really see enough talking about them.
The Negatives
It may seem very lovely this idea of having everything available online all the time, but this doesn’t hide the negatives it has, and here I would like to talk about privacy and the credibility of these software companies that host our information. After everything became online, all our information are hosted with software providers, calendars with gcal, bookmarks with del.icio.us, projects with basecamp, photos with flickr, emails with gmail and many other web apps, our personal data are spread all over the internet with those software companies.
For example Google knows about me more than my family does, logging my search history, having my emails, calendars and even spreadsheets, not to mention if I installed google desktop, they can have access to all my files. Does this feel right? I think we are trusting Google as long as they are maintaining their credibility with us but what about the rest?
Now the boom itself has created a big problem in the market, it’s really unbelievable the amount of new web applications that are coming online everyday, mostly solving the same problem but in a little different way, most of them are free, this is good for the user at some point but not for software companies, everybody want to start a small startup and do his own business so we ended with a flooded market with dead web applications that has been made correctly but didn’t get any users.
I want to ask all software providers and all the new startups, please don’t try to re-solve a solved problem, the world is full with problems to be solved, pick an unsolved one and solve it, let’s not repeat ourselves and be as useful as we can for ourselves and for the community.
Another minor disadvantage of the webification process is the high dependency on the internet, all our information are stored there, if anything goes wrong, and we are unable to get connected, we are completely isolated and unable to access any of our data.
At the end of the day I look to my operating system and see that it is very clean with no installed applications, in the other hand I see my browser with many tabs opened to do my work, access my data and interact with my friends, I guess I’m completely webified despite all the negatives I’ve talked about here and I think I really enjoy it but with at least with few concerns that always in mind.
Chris said..
Hi there, it’s my first time on your site and I liked this article.
I’d have to agree with you about the negatives of webification. Except for the part about data being in someone elses control. As long as you don’t pick a fly by night company, I think it is pretty safe to assume that the company has your best interests at heart.
As to having everything only available with an internet connection — YES. That is a problem. I think some companies solve this by creating ways to export your data, and others by having a light application that syncs with the web site data. But it’s a problem.
I think the group collaboration benefits outweigh these downfalls however.
on July 17th at 3:40 amRida said..
Hello Chris, and welcome to ridaalbarazi.com.
Regarding the privacy issue, there were many solutions out there, sometimes it’s the privacy statements and some other times it’s the reputation of the company itself.
At the end it’s a matter of how much do we trust those companies, and how much are these companies able to maintain such a credibility, this is something hard on companies to establish and maintain otherwise they can’t get a decent place in the market.
We can say that it is related also to the user limits in trusting others, and how much is he/she obsessed about the idea of privacy, but finally the fact is: you have to risk some of your privacy for great benefits.
on July 17th at 12:23 pmRami Kayyali said..
But this webification is only biting a piece of desktop applications. As far as I know, moderately-big corporates simply don’t use these applications, they don’t trust these services not with their data, but with their reliability.
Of course, it’s great to have all software accessable via the Internet, but maybe if we had someway to sync online/offline data it would be more appealing and trustworthy.
on July 18th at 4:10 amRida said..
I guess big corporates intend to make these kind of softwares for themselves, a while ago I heard that Microsoft have such a huge CRM and ERP solutions for corporates that allows companies to make their own servers and hosted services in-house so they don’t care about any privacy issues, but all of them at the end have to have the web-based feature.
I guess we will reach the level that we will be lazy to synchronize with our offline machines even when it is possible, the same happened when we moved from paper work to automated work, now we are lazy to print the documents we have as soft-copies, and so will be the situation with the web based copy I believe.
on July 18th at 5:15 pmAbdelrahman Osama said..
You are right, but the positives are much more than the negatives and I see that web apps are really replacing desktop apps, even OS’s will be webified sooner or later.
on July 19th at 10:13 amAndy Budd was asked about privacy issues and is it safe to have all your information in the hands of start ups owners in his presentation What is Web 2.0? in last year’s d.Construct he answered you can’t trust a new start up with important or highly private data but you can trust them with your to-do list etc.. but some one like Google or Yahoo you can trust them with your important data.
And the disadvantage dependency on the internet is not an issue any more, yes there is countries and regions that can’t connect to the internet easily but I don’t think those countries are the targeted market of Web 2.0 apps.
The real disadvantage that I see and I’m afraid of is the lack of reliability compared to desktop apps, a problem that I face a lot for example is after I fill a form and submit or make any operation on a web app I lost my connection before I get to the other page or I get back the result of my operation in a way or another I get lost is it done now or not some times it get screwed and saved as it is etc… any way I’m sure sooner or later there will be a solution to such problems.
Rida Al Barazi » 9rules Network Official Blog said..
[...] Rida is a developer and designer. If you’re a programmer, you’ll enjoy it. If you aren’t a programmer there are still articles that will make you think. Is everything getting webified? Have you answered the interesting questions of life? [...]
on August 16th at 10:14 pmسردال » كيف أستفيد من خدمات الويب؟ said..
[...] هناك نقطة أخرى، هل تثق بالموقع بأنه سيستمر في العمل ولن يتوقف في يوم ما فجأة ليأخذ معه كل بياناتك؟ شركة مثل غوغل وياهو ومايكروسوفت وغيرها من الشركات الكبيرة تحرص على إتقان إدارة خدماتها، لذلك لا خوف من ضياع البيانات، ماذا عن الشركات الصغيرة؟ هل تستطيع أن تثق بشركة يديرها شخص أو شخصان؟ ليس هناك إجابة واحدة على كل هذه الأسئلة، لكل شخص رأي هنا، الأخ رضا البرازي كتب بتفصيل أكبر عن إيجابيات وسلبيات خدمات الويب، يمكن الرجوع لمقاله لقراءة المزيد حول الموضوع. [...]
on November 15th at 4:51 pmJeremy said..
Hey! And what did he say under?? :)
on November 29th at 1:54 pmallegra_n said..
on April 23rd at 10:11 am