Welcome to the future

What software is installed on your computer?

Four years ago when I started zfweb my morning routine would be

   1. Start up my G3 Macintosh laptop
   2. Dialup (yes it's true)
   3. Start the 5 programs that I used daily
   4. Make coffee while they took their time to load
   5. Check the Sydney Morning Herald website on a web browser
   6. Start work

In a day I could easily use 15 programs that were installed on my computer. The more I had running, the slower my computer ran Too many and it would crash.

These days my daily start-up involves:

   1. Opening my MacBook Pro laptop to wake it from sleep
   2. The internet is of course already running, at over a thousand times of dialup of old
   3. Email, messenger and skype open of their own accord
   4. Check Facebook and SMH on my "personal" web browser, Safari
   5. Open Firefox my "work" browser and start work.

This is because 90% of the programs I use are now are on the internet. These include:

• Saasu - online accounting software (no more MYOB)
• Salesforce - online client database (no more filemaker pro)
• 88 miles - online time-sheet software (no more excell)
• Brainkeeper - online wiki that we use as an intranet (no more doccuments storeed on hard drives)
• Google Analytics - from which I track all the movement through our websites
• And of course Typepad, from which we write our blog posts

So what does it all mean?

• I can be on any computer with an internet connection and be able to access all our business applications.
• I can generate an invoice for a client from their office and not my own
• It means I can be going to a meeting, and look up the address via the web-browser on my mobile phone.
• That (heaven forbid) if zfweb were to burn down tomorrow, we could all camp out in an internet cafe and carry on as normal.
• Our staff can work at home without needing to cart a laptop on the train
• That I could be posting this blog post from my desk, the airport or even the beach

Online software is not stopping there. This website was the inspiration for this blog post - a website that allows you to design and then download your own fonts.

In the future I think traditional software will continue to die, so that soon a computer will be simply a terminal onto the world. Personally I think it's great but by all means beg to differ.

Comments

[Andrew]

Hey ZF

Slow day at the office, so I'm sticking me beak in at what friends are doing.

I love this post. So true, cloud computing and web-based applications are the way it’s going. Have you seen the online beta application from Adobe, you can even edit images within a browser

A buzz concept at the moment, in the area of Samsung I work at (see my link), is DLNA.

http://www.dlna.org/home

You can read the white paper at the link above, but essentially it is about having appliances talk to each other. Currently this includes PCs, laptops, mobiles, televisions, NAS devices, gaming consoles, but in the future I think it will stretch further to encompass appliances such as: washing machines, air conditioners and (just for you zf) coffee machines.

What this means is that your coffee machine – which I have no doubt is gorgeous like its owner – could have blue-tooth/WiFi connectivity to your network and broadcast a widget that you control via a web browser. So you don’t even have to go to the machine to get it operational.

Where this technology gets really sexy though is when you throw LBS into the mix.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location-based_service

Writing your blog at the beach, your phone, via the GPS, knows you are in a ‘personal’ location and can automatically divert non-personal calls to voicemail. Then when you head back to the office, the air-conditioner, also networked, is switched on automatically when you are in certain radius of your office. Note this radius can be spatial or temporal. How temporal? Well, mapping companies have a huge amount of map data. Not just the physical maps, but how long roads/paths take to navigate on foot/Car/public transport. The air-conditioner also broadcasts a widget so you can adjust the temperature/fan speed via your mobile device.

Cool eh?

We need to get other ex MDCM’ers commenting here, but glad I’m your first post.