Les applications en ligne simplifient la vie des utilisateurs
Très bonne citation de Paul Graham citée par Robin Good que je m’empresse de… citer ici avec quelques autres pour mémoire (les mises en gras sont de moi). L’article en question (The Other Road Ahead) est un pur bijou en terme de clarté et vision de l’informatique.
When we look back on the desktop software era, I think we’ll marvel at the inconveniences people put up with, just as we marvel now at what early car owners put up with. For the first twenty or thirty years, you had to be a car expert to own a car. But cars were such a big win that lots of people who weren’t car experts wanted to have them as well.
Computers are in this phase now. When you own a desktop computer, you end up learning a lot more than you wanted to know about what’s happening inside it. But more than half the households in the US own one. My mother has a computer that she uses for email and for keeping accounts. About a year ago she was alarmed to receive a letter from Apple, offering her a discount on a new version of the operating system. There’s something wrong when a sixty-five year old woman who wants to use a computer for email and accounts has to think about installing new operating sytems. Ordinary users shouldn’t even know the words “operating system,” much less “device driver” or “patch.”
There is now another way to deliver software that will save users from becoming system administrators. Web-based applications are programs that run on Web servers and use Web pages as the user interface. For the average user this new kind of software will be easier, cheaper, more mobile, more reliable, and often more powerful than desktop software.
With Web-based software, most users won’t have to think about anything except the applications they use. All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a server somewhere, maintained by the kind of people who are good at that kind of thing. And so you won’t ordinarily need a computer, per se, to use software. All you’ll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a Web browser.
To use a purely Web-based application, all you need is a browser connected to the Internet. So you can use a Web-based application anywhere. When you install software on your desktop computer, you can only use it on that computer. Worse still, your files are trapped on that computer.
The whole idea of “your computer” is going away, and being replaced with “your data.” You should be able to get at your data from any computer.
With Web-based applications, everyone uses the same version, and bugs can be fixed as soon as they’re discovered. So Web-based software should have far fewer bugs than desktop software.
When you use a Web-based application, your data will be safer. Disk crashes won’t be a thing of the past, but users won’t hear about them anymore. They’ll happen within server farms. And companies offering Web-based applications will actually do backups– not only because they’ll have real system administrators worrying about such things, but because an ASP that does lose people’s data will be in big, big trouble. When people lose their own data in a disk crash, they can’t get that mad, because they only have themselves to be mad at. When a company loses their data for them, they’ll get a lot madder.
Finally, Web-based software should be less vulnerable to viruses. If the client doesn’t run anything except a browser, there’s less chance of running viruses, and no data locally to damage.
Because the software in a Web-based application will be a collection of programs rather than a single binary, it can be written in any number of different languages. When you’re writing desktop software, you’re practically forced to write the application in the same language as the underlying operating system– meaning C and C++.
With server-based software, no one can tell you what language to use, because you control the whole system, right down to the hardware. Different languages are good for different tasks. You can use whichever is best for each.
With server-based software, you can make changes almost as you would in a program you were writing for yourself. You release software as a series of incremental changes instead of an occasional big explosion. A typical desktop software company might do one or two releases a year.
The other major technical advantage of Web-based software is that you can reproduce most bugs. You have the users’ data right there on your disk. If someone breaks your software, you don’t have to try to guess what’s going on, as you would with desktop software: you should be able to reproduce the error while they’re on the phone with you. You might even know about it already, if you have code for noticing errors built into your application.
Software should do what users think it will. But you can’t have any idea what users will be thinking, believe me, until you watch them. And server-based software gives you unprecedented information about their behavior. You’re not limited to small, artificial focus groups. You can see every click made by every user. You have to consider carefully what you’re going to look at, because you don’t want to violate users’ privacy, but even the most general statistical sampling can be very useful.
Why did desktop computers take over? I think it was because they had better software. And I think the reason microcomputer software was better was that it could be written by small companies.
Source: Robin Good > Benefits Of Web-Based Applications And Microsoft Announcement Of The “Live” Era
Tags: bureautique, online
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