I found this fascinating quote today:
I wrote six months ago about the launch of Symantec’s GoEverywhere product – a reasonably innovative web top solution that was an aggregation point for multiple web applications.It Looks Like I was Wrong - GoEverywhere for the Dead Pool, Jun 2009
I never understood the whole Webtop principle - why would you use an online operating system when you've got a computer with a perfectly good (well, good enough if you're using Windows) operating system of it's own?
I understand if you're administering a big system, like in a university or some institutions, then this could be appealing. Kind of like the days of VT100 terminals hooked up to the mainframe.
Even in companies I don't think this would replace individual computers 100%. You still need some kind of browser based terminal - and we know prevalent those are in the market place: NOT! Intel (and competitors) netbook/top processors are taking computers in that direction, and the BIOS based browsers are helping too.
But the browser as a system platform is still a long way from reality. Even the standards leave themselves open to interpretation and every implementation is slightly different. I still think you're better developing for Windows, or *Nix, or Mac (perhaps using a cross-platform library) then trying to develop for HTML version X CSS version X JavaScript version X Renderer version X Script Engine version! It would be a debugging nightmare!!!
