Wagstaff hits a home run on "death of software"

This is a post I wish I'd written. WSJ columnist Jeremy Wagstaff, writing on his loose wire blog, sums up the sturm und drang about the "death" of Microsoft recently announced by Paul Graham with an elegant and hard to argue observation. What we're really talking about has less to do with Microsoft and more to do with the "death of software" on the desktop. Jeremy's take, and I'm in complete agreement, is that there's still a healthy pulse on the desktop and reports of desktop software's demise are indeed exaggerated (to paraphrase Mr. Twain).

It wouldn't be fair to quote the whole post here – visit Jeremy's blog and read it – but here's a choice quote to give you the flavor of his argument.

The problem: Most web applications are broken, and if we were paying for them, or Microsoft were making them, we’d be howling. Google Docs’ word processor, for example, quickly breaks down on bigger documents (weird artefacts appear in the text, keyboard shortcuts stop doing what they’re supposed to.) Its spreadsheet program mangles spreadsheets. The functionality in both is extremely limited for anything more than the most basic tasks.

All this takes us to a weird place: We somehow demand less and less from our software, so that we can declare a sort of victory. I love a lot of Web 2.0 apps but I’m not going to kid myself: They do one simple thing well — handle my tasks, say — or they are good at collaboration. They also load more quickly than their offline equivalents. But this is because, overall, they do less. When we want our software to do less quicker, they’re good. Otherwise they’re a pale imitation of more powerful, exciting applications in which we do most of our work.

Jeremy goes on to list a number of desktop applications that have no credible online counterpart and he's absolutely correct in his examples. One that I found especially well taken was his observation regarding Mindjet MindManager compared to the online tools that have recently popped up loke MindMeister (covered on this blog here) and Mindomo. The online options are nicely conceived and executed but they simply do not offer the same breadth or depth of features and functionality as MindManager. I called MindMeister an excellent companion to MindManager and I continue to think about it in just that way. It's great for sharing maps with others when I want to collaborate but I don't find it particularly satisfying when authoring a new map.

As I remarked in my post yesterday about the online/offline dustup, an all or none position in either direction is difficult to defend. We'll be working in a hybrid mode, using the richness of the local client app when appropriate and working online when we need cross-device access or want to collaborate easily with others.

UPDATE: Tris Hussey weighs in with his thoughts (hint: he's not much of a fan of online apps in general).