the end of windows

According to a recent post on ReadWriteWeb, a couple of Gartner analysts have pronounced the death of Windows.  Its an interesting read, but not anything I think of relevance to us in the real world. I believe this is the fourth or fifth or millionth time that the desktop has been pronounced dead, and yet it still lives on.  There's an awful lot to be said for being in an office where your connection speeds are high enough that you would predict the death of the desktop in favour of internet apps (or cloud computing as we call it these days). The thing is, outside of our cosy existence with fast broadband links, there's a lot of reason why it just doesn't work. 

When I work on entries for my blog, I do them offline.  I used use notepad, and while that served me well for many years, I have started to use Windows Live Writer more and more.  It allows me to write a post for this blog offline and do it in a WYSIWYG manner.  I'm sure we have a more fashionable name for that too.  Anyway, there's no reason why I couldn't do this online with the exception for my fear of a lost connection.  While I was using the online editing page of my blog for posting, if my network went down then I would have lost this post.  However, now I don't worry about it anymore.  Actually there's a three hour gap between the second last and last sentences.  Try that with an online service. Sure, some of them could handle it, but not all.

Next other reason is the interface. If I should accidentally close this window, it will prompt me to save my work before exiting.  My browser won't do that.  It also won't present me with the slick experience I get with this offline app.  Its not that it can't, its just that it doesn't.  Most of the web apps I have seen where there is a "user input" type area tend to suffer a little from lack of love.  They tend to be functional rather than beautiful.  Me, I like the beauty.  I have a PC that is powerful enough to be able to present me with beautiful things, so why the hell shouldn't I use it to do just that?  To hell with web-apps and their inherent minimalist approach to doing things.  I want the fat client experience!