Is the Cloud Killing the Desktop? Not So Fast

Grazed from Wired. Author: Jack

Cloud computing has been changing the way businesses achieve greater innovation and agility, but it has also been impacting the way that actual employees interact with business tools and are able to do their work. 20 years ago, employees would typically have very powerful work stations, in the sense that the local, personal computer was where all the heavy processing and apps resided.

Today, moderately powerful workstations are the launching point for a broader mix of workloads, some local, some web enabled. Upwards of 75% of workloads employees are handling are now web-based, whether we are talking about email, CRM, analytics, etc. Some apps (I’m looking at you Quickbooks and Excel) are still local, but that’s changing, too…

The near term trend points to a range of processes and applications moving to the browser as the primary point of user interaction, establishing the browser as an operating system unto itself (HTML 5 is accelerating this trend, as is the advancements Chrome and Safari are achieving through Webkit)…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/06/is-the-cloud-killing-the-desktop-not-so-fast/