As you may know one of my technological passions is Software as a Service (SaaS). I’ve written about it a lot and have deciphered the differences between commonly interchnaged terms like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0.
I read numerous blogs (listed at bottom) about SaaS at all levels of business and consumer services. It’s the future – applications agnostic of your desktop platform.
So, when Jonas started dropping comments on some of my SaaS articles I wandered over to his blog to see what it was all about. I saw his tagline and I was hooked – “I want to uninstall all applications from my desktop and only use tools on the web. Call it web 2.0, webapplications or apps on tap. This is my story…”. I love this idea. So, I tapped him for a Q&A. Here goes…
Q&A with Jonas of My Uninstalled Life
What got first got you interested in Web Services?
Well, there are three reasons mainly.
1. I was working as a system consultant for one of the biggest companies in Sweden with 20.000+ employees spread over 100+ locations all over Europe and they had a huge problem with deploying their locally installed applications. They started to use “Terminal Services” to access applications installed on centrally deployed servers. But it was huge amount of work to get it to work, cost massive amount of money in time and licensing.
2. I supported all my realtives computer problems and they often broke their locally installed applications.
3. I travel a lot and I often miss “my local stuff” – apps, data and so on.
Why not simply just put it on the web – always accessible and no problems with locally installed apps.
What made you decide to make ‘the big switch’ to a web services based environment?
When I saw the potential and realized that I always had access to “my local stuff” – even from my mobile phone. I started with e-mail, my bookmarks, my RSS feeds and so on… Then I decided to start the blog “My Uninstalled Life” – www.myuninstalledlife.com where I want it to take it to the extremes. I more or less want a small “thin client” on my desk and keep everything else somewhere else (apps, my documents and files etc). I also challenge the market where I more or less ask for “impossible” stuff. For example, I do some video editing and I want an online application to do this for my – not a locally installed ones.
What are your top 5 web services?
To keep my knowledge up to the market, I use many different services. There are many large competitors that offer a “suite” with many apps that are “ok” but I try to get the best from each category – and it can changes in an instant, next month my top 5 could look completely different. Keep on visiting My Uninstalled Life for updates.
Google Apps for your Domain – I run a small company besides my work. Excellent online e-mail and calendar
EditGrid – Excel replacement that’s far ahead of all competitors
Zoho Writer – Word replacement
Windows Live – My personal startup page where I monitor RSS feeds and add gadgets
Technorati/Digg – Excellent tools to find blogs that inspires my own blog
How far along are you in replacing your desktop software?
I still have a few apps installed on my desktop – the ones I haven’t found replacement for yet. What I’m trying to do now is to find some small “hardware appliance” that runs nothing else than a webbrowser and just use my local desktop when I need to. I also tried to put all my 100s of gigabytes of data at an online storage provider but unfortunately – it didn’t work very well. I ran into technical difficulties and my 24/1 Mbit connection is simply not fast enough for upstream yet. So I decided to build a “NAS-box” with 1 TB of disk and since I wanted to keep it as “uninstalled” and simple as possible, I simply boot up FreeNAS from a USB-key instead. With this solution, I don’t have to manage updates of the OS – just a massive storage device where I keep my files. Also I’ve “uninstalled” my HTPC and now running my XBOX with XBOX Media Center. No need to manage the OS anymore and I just stream movies and music from my NAS-box.
Have you found any applications you can’t possibly replace?
Still, I can’t burn my CDs with an webapp. Also, apps that require quite much resources from your compuater are hard to find, such as GIMP (image editing such as Photoshop), VirtualDub (video editing such as Adobe Premiere).
How long do you think it will take for this Software as a Services model to break into the enterprise? small business? home office?
Home Office – I would say it’s already there. Or I’d rather say – it could be there. I would say most of the homeusers wouldn’t need more than what the web apps offer when it comes to features. It’s just a matter of time before the knowledge of web apps is transferred from the highly technical people to the general public.
Small Business – I would say the same as home office but there needs to be a better guarantee it works. It’s totally unacceptable that a complete business would be stranded just because there’s a problem at an online service provider that hosts their word application are having problems
Enterprise – I think it still takes a few years. I’ve seen many companies moving from locally installed apps to web apps but I think they will keep it in-house just for security and also they want to manage it themselves. It’s hard to guarantee the Service Level Agreement otherwise. But I’m sure we’ll see the possibility to buy a “Google Docs server” for the enterprise and let internal users use it instead of the public ones. They already sell the Google Search Engine as an appliance.
What do you think are the advantages / disadvantages to this model?
Advantages is cost and simplicity. Companies offer web apps could probably have a much lower price than companies that sell CDs in boxes. For enterprise there could be massive savings by simply putting a link on their intranet to the applications than installing them on locally on all clients or publishing them in an Terminal Services farm. Disadvantages could be the amount of features. Most online apps are a little bit behind when it comes to features – so you probably still need some users that need locally installed ones – at least until the web apps catches up ;)
What do you think of Phil Wainewright’s post called ‘Why Office 2.0 Will Never Go Online‘?
He’s completely right. They have to solve the “offline issue” – not just because “network glitches” but there are some places you simply can’t connect. But he focus on TODAY – I focus on tomorrow. 10 years ago, I usually couldn’t get an Internet connection to my house without paying a fortune. And people couldn’t dream of an Internet connection on an airplane or on the train – now you can. And in 20 years I think Internet will evolve and you see it as obvious as you see electricity, TV, phone… It will simply “work”. But yes – offline access has to work aswell. But why shouldn’t this be possible – there’s a “Work Offline” choice in Firefox. Why wouldn’t it work with complicated apps like Google Calendar, GMail and EditGrid? All changes is stored locally until you connect again and all changes are synchronized – just as with your local Outlook client today. I don’t care if it needs to download 100 MBs just to get it to work. Scrybe is one application going this way – be sure to check it out once released.
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I want to thank Jonas for taking time in answering my questions. Keep up the great work.
Want more on SaaS?
Enterprise Web 2.0
Service Oriented Architecture
Software as Services
Tags: SaaS, Technology, Web 2.0, Web, SOA, Web Services
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