60minuteswiththegeeks

The WEB Isn’t The DESKTOP…

I got wind of youOS sometimes last year and here I am asking what’s up with it.
I remember I was quite excited when I first fiddled with it, the whole philosophy sounded cool but my excitement was a little too quick in dampening out; which was due to obvious reasons.

For one the whole stuff was too slow, it was a little bit on the heavy side and it was clunky. And secondly, somewhere deep down inside, the whole idea just didn’t gel. I asked myself what really is the utility I will derive from something like youOS and I couldn’t find a cogent one…
Which brings me to the crux of this post, i.e. your success on the web depends on how well you truly understand the web as a platform. This is something I feel youOS didn’t get right, apart from all other criticism leveled against the technology itself.

First let start with the screen shot:

That definitely looks like a desktop right? With a wallpaper having the text “youOS” imprinted on it abi?

Wrong. What you see up there isn’t a screenshot of a desktop; it is what you’ll get when you point your browser to www.youos.com and get yourself an account.

You see, in coming up with a GUI philosophy, they tried as much as possible to mimic the desktop and to create a user experience reminiscent of the desktop. From there we could start sensing an erroneous philosophy: “Try as much as possible to bring the desktop to the web” which is out rightly a wrong way of doing things on the web.

The web isn’t the desktop and it will never be. The web has its own characteristics and it should be understood.

You see, when you are on the desktop you play by different set of rules. Understanding the characteristics of the desktop/personal computing goes a long way in ensuring success.

The PC revolution that brought about the concept of desktop was nothing more than empowering users with the ability to easily create digital content. That was the crux of personal computing. And those who won on the desktop are those who understood the of personal computing and built application tailored to harness the resources the PC provides.

Applications that let people create digital content; Applications that gave me and you the power to do our book keeping, prepare our spreadsheet reports, prepare sales pitching presentations, do our Computer Aided Designs. Applications like Photoshop that enables us to design the company’s logo.

That is the desktop: enable user to create.

But when you then get on the web you have to play by a different set of rules since the web is different.

You see while the desktop is more of giving people to power to create digital content, the
web/internet is more of allowing people to share the digital contents they have.

The web is more of sharing, communicating, networking and gathering of information. And in this, lies the intrinsic characteristic of the web.

This comes at no surprise that when we take a look at the killer apps running on the web today, they are just services that builds on these features; applications that enables people to share, communicate and network…

Applications like: Email, Search Engines, Instant Messaging, Forums, shopping cart, Publishing Applications e.g.wikis and blogs, collaborating applications and more recently, Social networking applications.

That is the Web: enable the user to share.

The web was never meant to be a data processing medium and as such we won’t be having a scenario where all our desktop applications in their entirety get ported to the web. Sure there will be some who by virtue of there task will do well when ported to the web. A web application like meebo for instance. [but don’t forget, meebo is all about IM; which is nothing but communicating and sharing].

So when youOS tells me that I will have access to all my data processing task from anywhere in the world via a browser and they give me my familiar desktop user interface to go with it, I’m not moved.

Little wonders then, that in almost the same time frame, youtube which was built to harness the features of the web .i.e. enable people to share, went on to be such a tremendous success.

The only scenario where porting the desktop user interface, exactly as it is, to the web might make sense is when providing enterprise solutions. As Dipo Fasoro aptly pointed out when we discussed the issue. It will make sense to have the web based version of a well known desktop app look, if not completely like its desktop antecedent.

But then, in such scenario, it is not about the web but that particular app. It is not about making the user experience with the web reminiscent of the desktop user interface paradigm, but making the user experience with that app through the browser reminiscent of what it looked like on the desktop.

So on the internet/web, you have access to a tremendous amount of information, you have the ability to easily communicate to an unbelievable huge audience, have them interact simultaneously with each other…these are what makes the web the web, so instead of wasting time morphing the web into another desktop we should be spending time coming up with applications, with their unique user interfaces, creatively designed to maximize the web.