How useful will Desktop Virtualization be in 5 years? 10 years?

As I ponder the impact of Google's Chrome OS and HTML 5, it makes me take another look at enterprise software. Software on the web continues to evolve and impress. Have you even seen the Outlook Web Access client that comes with Exchange 2007? At this rate, how much longer will it make sense to install and maintain Outlook?

Enterprise software is *slowly* moving to the web. The integration of SharePoint and Office 2010 Web Apps excites me. If you have not heard about it, check out Web Worker Daily's write up.

Microsoft is not the only moving their software to the web. In the accounting world, I continue to watch my job become less and less relevant. Intuit has ported QuickBooks to the web. CCH, a juggernaut in the accounting vertical, has released their entire ProSystem fx Suite online.

CAN DESKTOP AND APPLICATION VIRTUALIZATION MATURE FAST ENOUGH?

All client virtualization solutions seek to similarly solve the immediate difficulties faced by IT departments that the distributed nature of Microsoft Windows creates. Distributed computing has failed, to put it bluntly. The reason there are so many vendors (Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, among others...) all trying to solve essentially the same problem; that Windows was never designed for this purpose. Every solution struggles to work for more than just task workers. Still yet, the solutions available clearly have much room to grow before they are usable in most enterprises.

There will always be software that benefits from application virtualization and streaming, though overtime that will be more and more of a niche use. My fear is that by the time client virtualization "grows up", it will be too late. But then again, maybe that is what Microsoft wants. Slow and steady will not win this race.

Apps moving to the web may happen sooner than you think

Easily the largest bet that Google is placing for Chrome OS is that developers will develop for the web, utilizing HTML 5 standards. Many on the blogosphere have been quick to cite all the reasons why this is a poorly placed bet. Outside of Google, how many applications are as useful as the free apps provided by Google? Google has set the bar quite high in developing for the web. Truth be told, if Google convinces the application developers of the world to develop for the web, it will be more than Chromebook owners who will benefit.

HOW APPLE'S APP STORE AND SMARTPHONE COMPETITION WILL SPUR HTML 5 DEVELOPMENT

You would have to be living under a rock for the past year to have not heard the constant developer grousing of the App Store approval process. Applications are rejected for nebulous reasons, updates that resolve bugs sit on Apple's desks for months, approved apps a shell of what the developer wanted to include, etc. This process has led to half completed apps, developers abandoning the platform altogether and apps becoming less profitable as needless development time is wasted.

Regardless of the strengths of the App Store, the once incredible momentum and enthusiasm is gone. Competitors to Apple are catching up as well. The enthusiasm for the latest Android smartphone, a joint venture of Google, Motorola and Verizon dubbed 'Droid', is proof. Having spent some time with the phone, I can whole heartedly agree with reviewers' stance that it is not an iPhone killer. The Android OS lacks the polish of the iPhone OS, nor is it anywhere near as intuitive to use. Not yet, at least.

Follow the logic here: I'm a developer and have finite resources. I want to develop an app for as many platforms as possible with as little development time as possible. That means code once and done. I don't have time to wait for Apple to approve my app and chance that I'll have to rewrite code that works fine as is. How should I code?

ENTER HTML 5

Both the iPhone and Android browsers support HTML 5. On the desktop OS front, even Internet Explorer 9 is getting the HTML 5 treatment. Also, RIM acquired Torch mobile means that all BlackBerries will soon have a default WebKit based browser, making HTML 5 support highly inevitable. So if you're on a netbook, laptop, desktop or smartphone, chances are your browser will support HTML 5 standards.

With companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple, as well as the entire open source community, all pledging support for HTML 5 standards, it is clear that the industry sees tomorrow's applications living on the web.

WHY CAN'T TOMORROW BE TODAY?

Given the current frustrations being experienced by app developers, one has to wonder why they wouldn't be rejoicing at the opportunity to move to HTML 5. HTML 5 puts the developers in control:

• Remove the Vendor middleman
• Applications do not have to be installed
• Applications can be taken offline
• Updates are applied at the developer's choosing
• All platforms supported

Everybody wins, sort of. Moving code to the web can be a tedious process and requires the support of the user community. Showing there is a demand will help move this process along.

GOOGLE STANDS TO WIN THE MOST

Regardless of whether the Chromebook is a success, the success of HTML 5 will result in more time spent on the web. More time on the web means greater exposure to Google's ads, resulting in Google making more money. Though the greatest experience on the web, particularly at an ultra low price point, will be on the Chromebook. Can bandwidth speeds accelerate fast enough for web apps to be useful in enough of the country?

A Change Users Can Believe In

Change is inevitable. Seasons change, the weather changes, our height changes and so does our weight. Everywhere I look is change. Nothing is more human than the ability to adapt to change. The human race survived an Ice Age; talk about adapting to change!

CAN USERS ADAPT TO A CHANGE IN OS?

It is certain there are two things that bring about change:

1. Inspiration
2. Desperation

When we look at the explosion of mobile market share on both the Android and iPhone/iPod Touch platforms, it is obvious why this happened. Users are inspired by the new and innovative way they can quickly and conveniently access the web. By a couple of intuitive gestures or presses, users are on the web faster than ever. Simply pull the MID out of your pocket and go.

As Mark and I joke often, if you asked them, "Excuse me, what OS are you running?", you'd be lucky if you received more than a blank stare.

HOME APPLIANCES JUST WORK

When I turn on my TV, I'm watching what I want within seconds. When I turn on the radio, I'm listening to music within seconds. When I pick up a phone, I immediately hear a dial tone and I can contact someone within seconds. That's the way home appliances function. By that measure of ease of use, it is readily apparent that a computer is not a home appliance.

Imagine for a moment a world where every home appliance was like the computer. Your TV has to reboot because it received updates in the middle of the Giants game. Your radio is infected with a virus and the antenna has to be unplugged immediately so it doesn't spread the infection to other radios. Your phone's connection is slow today so your voice will be delayed for 5 seconds.

Clearly immediacy and reliability of a home appliance are paramount to its success. When we look to the explosive growth in the MID market, it is also obvious that users are desperate for immediate and reliable platforms to connect to the web.

OPERATING SYSTEMS ARE NOT AT THE CENTER OF THE USERS COMPUTING EXPERIENCE

There was a time when the OS was a 'killer app'. These days, the web is at the center of everyone's computing experience. There are a whole generation of users who live on Facebook, YouTube and the like. Everyday, these web apps change with them and become more sophisticated. The OS has become peripheral to the users experience.

Facebook alone has over 300 Million users; how many locally installed applications can boast as many or more users other than the web browser? That's not to say that there are not local applications that we cannot live without. The problem for OS's is that handful of applications are growing smaller and smaller everyday. Paul Thurrott wrote about this very concept and I must say, I Thurrott-ly agree with him.

HUMANS WILL ALWAYS CHOOSE THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE

Extending the traditional OS to the Internet has been a slow and painful process, to paraphrase Jon Stokes' article which briefly comments on how the PC is failing at the Internet.

I believe that users are desperate for a change. The sheer volume of help desk tickets any IT professional receives are indicative of this. Percentage wise, how many tickets simply come from a misunderstanding of how to do something in Microsoft Windows? Sure, we IT professionals brush it off as, "Users need more training", or worse, call them all sorts of names. I often wonder how many IT jobs have been created solely because of the complexity of the OS.

If change does not improve the way a user connects to their applications, then it will fail (think Linux and how hard it is to even get applications on it that aren't already bundled).

Users just want to be connected to their applications. Therefore, the potential for a Chromebook that boots right into the web browser and near-instantly connects them to their applications touches on the very drivers of change. So the potential is there, connecting users to their applications with as little resistance as possible. That's all I'm saying. But will all their applications move with them to the web?

Why does Chrome OS matter to the Enterprise?

It doesn't. It's all about the mindset and where users learn best: at home. Consumerism has kept IT afloat during the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression and shows no sign of slowing down. I personally can't remember in my career so many users bringing gadgets, phone and netbooks to work with them and asking how they can work from them, such as accessing corporate e-mail, calendar and published applications.

OK, so follow me here. I'm not implying that the Enterprise needs to adopt Google Chrome OS. If you thought that and stopped reading, well, I understand. There is so much discussion on the blogosphere regarding whether or not Chrome OS will be a success; thus reiterating the pros and cons of the web-centric OS would be a waste of your time. I want to look at it from the IT professionals perspective. I want to encourage every IT professional out there to tell everyone to buy a *mature* Chromebook, and here's why:

Thanks to Microsoft, starting with Windows 95, much of the way users use their computer at work has everything to do with the way they use their computer at home. Chrome OS is a browser based OS, but in terms of IT speak it is a 'Thin OS'. Changing the way users play will inevitably change the way users work.

FILES SAVED LOCALLY BY THE USER ARE FILES THAT WILL INVARIABLY BE LOST FOREVER

Redirecting a user's 'My Documents' has been standard procedure for IT Departments for sometime now. For a fact, most users will never take the time to backup their files, so redirection is a good thing. In SMB, laptops are ubiquitous! The fact that Microsoft didn't include tools in Server 2003 to redirect the entire user's profile is extremely short-sighted on their part. Did Microsoft designers/developers ever take a moment and ask themselves who they are really coding for? I do not know. My point with all of this is that we want users to be accustomed to storing files somewhere other than locally. All too often in large enterprises and SMB, files are lost forever because a laptop was stolen, the hard drive shit the bed, the user overwrote an important file, etc. To give them a choice to store the file locally will inevitably lead them to do so. It's not their fault! They really have no idea what they are doing, honest. We have to train them through use at home that this is a baaaad idea.

USER INSTALLED APPS ... SERIOUSLY?

I like the idea of Citrix Dazzle and that users can select the applications they need. That's not what I'm referring to here. If a user brings a disc from home and wants to install said application which has not been vetted by the IT Department, now that's what I'm referring to. The whole notion that a user should be able to install their favorite personal apps on a company owned asset used only for business purposes is solely driven by the fact that the two environments, home and work, look and feel identical to them. We should have never let users have a wallpaper, it was all down hill from there... Chrome OS, users cannot install applications. All their applications are on the web which they know their firewall will block. One less hassle/political battle to fight!

THIN CLIENTS FTW!

All #epicpuns aside, thin clients are especially sexy for IT professionals. Managing clients with nice personalities is about as much fun as getting a lap(top) dance from one. Users will love the features of Thin Clients such as instant-on and no antivirus software subscriptions that eat up all their machines resources and marginally protects them from viruses and malware. They will also enjoy not having to make sure Windows Updates are installed (who has their machine on at 3 AM anyway?). After experiencing this at home users will beg for it at work. And won't we all be happy. :)

Google Chome OS... Is it the "Just Enough" OS for the masses?

For the record, I have no inclination of what or how useful Google's Chrome OS will be. News that a preview will be released next week has me excited though. This excitement is not driven by my urge to use it - hardly! A power user such as myself enjoys the complication of a sophisticated OS - Mac OS X and Windows 7 are 'fun' for me in levels that the average person would consider to be 'rocket science' (laughable really, considering the morons I've seen in IT, but I digress...), but did the average user ever ask for that kind of complexity?

Chetan Venkatesh, a wise man and CEO and founder of Atlantis Computing, told me that he believed that Microsoft was in trouble in the consumer arena. Apple would take the high end and Google would take everything else. Let's break it down: What do users want from a computer? Web browsing, e-mail, media playback, some applications for their finances... hey, aren't all these things handled by the web browser? Even iTunes shows signs of going the way of browser. Chrome is a solid browser and shows so much promise; to build an OS around appears to be logical.

I think I speak for the consumer when I say I just want to hit the power button and get to my (browser-fied) applications; that's it! I don't want to wait 10 minutes to logon to the computer, wait for the completely obtrusive virus scan to complete, double-check to make sure my WiFi is really connected (not partially - I know this improved somewhat over the crap-tastic WiFi support XP SP2 introduced), etc. How many prompts/how many obstacles/how much do I have to wait and suffer through just to get on Facebook?

Forget consumers, people just want their applications - that's it! Do I need or even remotely desire all the kludge that Windows 7/Vista/XP throws in our faces just to do basic tasks? And then I think of all the times where I ask users, "Did you make sure Windows updates are running, are you sure your virus definitions are up to date, when is the last time you defragged, etc." This is insane, particularly when you consider there are many users that still are unsure when to right-click a fucking mouse. OVER 20 YEARS AND PEOPLE STILL DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE A FUCKING MOUSE.

I don't think I can stress that last point enough. I know some would read this and think, "Well duh, they're just old people, they can't even find the power button." But wait, isn't that a problem in the design of most computers? So why limit the needlessly complicated use to the software. Yes, we have a MAJOR problem with hardware design as well. Let's take computers out of the equation for a minute. How many stupid buttons on your TV remote controllers (yes, plural on purpose) for one TV do you have that you will NEVER use. I'm looking at the three remote controllers it takes to just watch TV in my living room and I have counted over 70 buttons so far. 70 FUCKING BUTTONS. FUCK YOU SONY, OPTIMUM CABLEVISION, MICROSOFT ... Seriously, you clearly don't give a fuck about how I am going to actually use your products so I feel confident in giving you the one finger solute so hard your momma feels it.

My thoughts and hopes for Chrome OS are simple. Google will, in the same way it had a hand in molding the development of the hardware of the Droid, tie the user software and hardware experience into one well designed product. One simply hits the power button and he or she is on the internet doing what he or she wants with as little roadblocks as possible.

This is why Apple will continue to gain market share. 5 years ago, that was not an assured statement to declare, but today an obvious one. Being unsure though did not preclude me from saying that 5 years ago. Design is all about how a product functions. Apple designs the best personal computers, period.

This is not to say that Apple will ever have the plurality of computers out there; hardly. Yes, one does pay a premium for an Apple product and that will always turn most buyers off. The fact of the matter is, Mac OS X is a very simplistic and unified (hardware and software) experience that is unmatched by even the most expensive PC. If I give someone a Mac I will likely only hear from them for a week or two with basic questions and then after that rarely. On the other hand, if I give someone a PC, oh boy... It's going to be constant with malware and viruses, printers not printing, BSoD's, etc. Yeah, that's what I want to do, spend 4 hours at a clip that I can never get back or charge enough for. Over the life of the PC countless hours of my life that are gone forever because Microsoft made the PC, "Eh, good enough". Apple's not perfect and Snow Leopard is the buggiest release yet, but at least it's manageable!

For the remaining 80% of us Google Chrome OS is all we'll ever need. Though if the bandwidth problem in this country isn't solved, then forget everything I just wrote! We're the only Super Power in the world and we're not even in the Top 10, so pathetic...