"'What was missing from the market was the notion of the unified experience,' [Robertson] said." I don't understand the obsession people have with cramming thousands of apps into a single site. It seems to miss the point of the web. Isn't it much better for apps to run on their own sites with their own interfaces? Interoperability and sharing data between apps is huge, but the answer is not to put all apps on the same site. What are users supposed to think? "Oo, feature-crippled versions of all my favorite apps!" Web desktops strike me as having the worst of both worlds: none of the feature richness of the web and none of the UI advantages of the desktop. For non-power users, having everything in one place doesn't seem compelling enough to ignore that.
In fairness, the writer may have taken Robertson's comment out of context or altered its meaning, so apologies if that wasn't the fairest launching pad for a rant about web OSes.
I've been asking myself the same question for a while. I would like a unified experience so I have to spend less time worrying about interoperability, etc. On the other hand having a choice about every application means I can have the best application in every category. I wonder where the middle ground lies.
Facebook is probably one of the best unified experiences, but I guess if you're looking for something very OS-y, something like this is more your bag. Users shouldn't have to be the ones to worry about interoperability, but c'est la vie. Now if I can only find a French phrase about balancing trade-offs...
I think the problem might be that most users are used to the Windows UI experience so in order to reduce the learning curve this might have been the easiest option. However if the call it Windows and has a Windows GUI look and feel they are really asking for trouble.
Linspire ("Lindows") had a big Windows trademark dispute with Microsoft and came out quite well. Calling it ajaxWindows is probably an intentional taunt towards Microsoft.
i think where all these desktop copycats fail, approaches like NetVibes and widjets, succeed.
We all know the reasons for that, with the most important being that human kind needed to get away from desktop to web because of the decentralization of information.
oh and the "start" task bar every one of these tries to mimic, is soo 1995...come on, some innovation wouldn't hurt us...
by the way, this thing it crashed my firefox v3...
In fairness, the writer may have taken Robertson's comment out of context or altered its meaning, so apologies if that wasn't the fairest launching pad for a rant about web OSes.