Bye bye desktop, $1B Web Cloud is new home for apps: Google

Stan Beer
Thursday, 12 June 2008 08:20

Opinion and Analysis

While the world watched in rapturous awe at the happenings that took place a few days ago at the Apple WWDC, earlier this month Google held its own developers conference for the first time. The Google I/O conference, held in San Francisco, had one clear message - forget the desktop, the "Cloud" is where it's at and the Web is the new platform for application development. It's already a $1 billion market and growing fast.

Google, the 800 pound gorilla of the Web development space, wants to make its own slice of Web infrastructure - the Google Cloud - more accessible to developers and encourage them to build and run applications in it, according to technology analyst group Ovum.

“In many ways Google I/O is the first, and to date, largest developer conference for the Internet. The attendance was impressive - over 3,000 developers were at San Francisco's Moscone Center to attend sessions covering a range of issues over two days," says Madan Sheina, Principal Analyst at Ovum.

With ever increasing numbers of applications being developed for the Web, traditional desktop software companies such as Microsoft, are either living in denial or racing to develop strategies to take their software online.

This itself has presented traditional software developers with a dilemma: do they continue to focus on developing for their traditional market (how can you ignore Microsoft) or they boldly go where they've never gone before - into the Cloud.

"Google firmly believes that the Web has won through as the future platform for application development," says Ovum's Sheina.

"The company is now looking to woo developers to the Google Cloud and at the same time make the Web a better place by adding more and more functions to it. To achieve this Google wants to make its Cloud more accessible, keep connectivity to that Cloud pervasive, and make the Cloud's primary client the Web browser more powerful.”

“In other words it wants to make Web browsers as, if not more, powerful and rich in functionality as its desktop sibling. That's easier said than done and means transforming Web browsers from just dumb information search and retrieval terminals to highly interactive application interfaces that deliver new levels of utility to end users,” continued Sheina.

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