Via digg, “Microsoft Office 13 will be a Web Application!“:
“No more installed apps on your machine. Everything is going to the web for Microsoft (from an official Microsoft source).”
This isn’t the first time they’ve suggested this kind of move to hosted applications, although one might be forgiven for believing that previously it was FUD against thin clients. Is this FUD against the Google application rumours?
Also, it worked so well to move to a network model when Corel tried to do it with WordPerfect. There was also the Seattle-based company, was it Netdesk, that’s now purely a training company? They actually had a nice product back in the late 90’s. Seems like the Webcrossing people have been trying to make a network desktop of a sort for a while now.
Maybe, just maybe the apps will be on the network, but they will rely on local code, probably insecure code too. Also, people will never want to give up that last bit of illusion about ownership of the product, or trust their data to completely non-local storage.
UPDATE: Ha, someone else notices the similarity to some old promises. I was going to mention Hailstorm in this post originally, but didn’t. The one that got away, I suppose. CNET has an article about the connection, and how everything old is new again, “Windows Live rooted in MSN’s past“.