Stan Beer
Monday, 09 June 2008 14:17
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 4
An alternative title for this article was polluting the world, one program at a time but that's not fair. There's plenty of good software being developed that isn't a wasteful source of greenhouse gases, it just generally doesn't sit on the desktop anymore.
In a previous article, I focused on the fact that
most of us have been cajoled into buying personal computers that are
way too powerful for our needs and by extension too power hungry.
However, the hardware makers are by no means the only culpable parties
in this game.
There's no prizes for guessing which companies -and one in particular -
I'm talking about, so I won't even bother to name them. However,
Microsoft (oops!) can't really be blamed for its role in the
proliferation of desktop software.
After all, the Internet has only been mainstream since 1994. And it has
only been in the past two or three years that software as a service
(SaaS) applications have been made practical by the increasing spread
of broadband.
Prior to Web 2.0, desktop software on fat clients was the only practical way most of us could get our work done.
It could be argued that much of the desktop software (especially the
office productivity stuff) produced between 1995 and 2005 was redundant
and simply designed to force us to spend money on new hardware and
software. But hey, that's the business that supported us. So what's the
problem with desktop software now? Please read on to page 2
