One Desktop App to Rule Them All?

It isn’t anything new to suggest that most people really need just one application on their computer and they’d be fine. But it’s only been the past year or so when the single-purpose Web app started proliferating that it became reality instead of something tech pundits (and geeks) talked about. In the past year alone enough applications have finally reached a point of usability via the browser that I’m finding I use my desktop applications less and less.

From simpler sites like 37signals Ta-Da List to the more complex online collaborative word processor Writely there isn’t much left out there that a regular person would need that can’t be found online for free or relatively cheap. It isn’t just that there are a few of these Web-based applications either. In the field of online calendars there are already 18 competing with each other and Google hasn’t even launched its calendar yet. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that number hit 30 before a small handful of them leap to the top. The idea that a person buying a new computer will to have to buy any software in order to accomplish anything is going to be a distant memory sooner than later.

Even small to medium-sized businesses will no longer need high-priced desktop applications to run their business. In fact, many businesses will level the playing field with their larger competitors with easy and cheap access to online tools they probably didn’t use before due to price — or more likely complexity. For example Zookoda is a site that offers a very robust email marketing application for free yet offers many of the features you get from packages that cost much more. Plus using it is easy enough that almost anybody could do it, which can’t be said for most of the email marketing applications I’ve used. There is nothing stopping a small business with a Web browser from taking on any competitor, big or small, and leveraging online tools to their advantage. Can you imagine getting nice-looking and personalized email from your locally-owned pizza chain that is on par or better than what the national chains send?

As online apps mature and the better ones weed out the bad ones, it will be interesting to see how well they play together. You keep hearing about people clamoring for Google to release an entire online office suite to compete with (and destroy?) Microsoft. That doesn’t interest me so much. What does is the idea that I could pick and choose amongst all the different applications and bundle together my own office suite. If they’re all able to communicate and share the right data amongst one another, that will be easier to do than if we take the route of desktop apps where you were often locked into one system. 37signals recently released an API for Basecamp to allow outside developers access to Basecamp data. If the online apps freely exchange and share their data via APIs or RSS, I think everybody will be able to put together the office suite that suits them the best.

So give me a browser and a good group of Web apps to choose from and I’ll gladly delete most of my desktop applications. I won’t need them. For most, that will be the case. For others, they may still need to fire up Photoshop or OmniGraffle from time to time.