The End of Downloadable Applications?

For my last two years at Kazaa I was working on a brand spanking new desktop application. It was completely awesome but the details of that are not for this post.  This post is about what I slowly understood over those two years - that the time of the desktop internet application for consumers is over.

I 2004/5 I watched the emergence of excellent desktop applications like iMeem and Grouper (now Crackle). These had really raised the bar in terms of user experience and quality in media sharing applications. But it wasn’t long until they each started to re-invent themsleves as web applications.

This was during the emerence of the web we know today. The web that we own. The 2-way web. The web we use to connect with our friends. The web that doesn’t have the spyware, the hassle, the need-to-install-on-every-machine-i-want-to-use. The web that does have the capacity for massively viral effects, the web that is an application more powerful than we have ever seen before.

Check out the evolution of iMeem for example.

• 2005: Its all about the download
• 2006: The download is an optional extra
  
• Today: There is no download

They adapted to survive.

This is what I learned on that last project at Kazaa. We needed to connect with the web and, ideally, remove the need for an extra application.

Now it seems that even the biggest of modern desktop apps, Joost,  is in trouble.

Let’s see what happens next.

Filed under Software Development, Software I Like |