Commentary: The desktop is dead

As Peter Rip points out, the desktop is dead. (Thanks for the link, Paul.) While he highlights a few AJAX-based startups who are working on taking the "desktop" out of desktop applications (Writely and Meebo seem the most interesting to me, though I can't remember the last time I willingly used a word processing program - I've got email, after all), and moving them to the web.

As Peter points out, as I've been arguing here for going on two years

The real problem with desktop apps is no one works at their desktop anymore.

Amen. It's not going to happen tomorrow. It actually happened yesterday. It started the day email became a faster, more effective way to communicate than by laboring over documents, attaching them to an email, and then sending them along. Who should Microsoft blame the day its Office cash cow dies?

Itself.

Say what you want about Exchange, but Outlook defined what an email client should do, and how it should look. Once they added HTML/rich text editing, the writing was on the wall. Now as Microsoft speeds its BlackBerry response it's only hastening the beginning of the end for Office.

Which makes me wonder: maybe Microsoft actually has a great way out of the innovator's dilemma....? Maybe, by beefing up its email offerings, transitioning functionality from Excel and Word (PowerPoint probably always makes sense as a separate application) into Outlook it will end up trumping the industry again.