Friday, March 31, 2006

What's an application?

One of my daughters asked me a question that made me think the other day. She’s almost ten years old, and is very interested in technology. She’s using the computer in school, chatting with her friends using msn from home and creating homepages with some online tools she has found.

So, what was the question? Six months ago I introduced them to Microsoft Frontpage so that they could make their own homepage on the internet. When she found an online service for creating and editing homepages that uses a lot of AJAX-based technologies, I reminded her that this was the same thing as we had been doing in Frontpage. She then asked me if Frontpage was an application on her computer or if it was an application on the internet. For her there wasn’t any difference between using an online, hosted application to using a huge, expensive and locally installed application like Frontpage.

So beware, Microsoft, young generations will abandon your applications without a thought. For them everything is an applicaiton – wether it’s a local or remote application.

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