Yesterday, our young adult bible study group was meeting, and I remember there was some discussion that it may have been at a different place than normal. Shortly before going, I dug through my email (where the discussion took place) but couldn’t authoritatively determine what consensus as to a location had been reached. So, I ended up calling the location where it usually was to determine that it had, in fact, been moved.
When chatting about this once we had arrived, I mentioned to someone that part of my difficulty in finding the email was that none of the emails in the discussion had subject lines, which had made it a bit tougher to try to find. Her response was, “Well, that’s because you’re not using Gmail.”
That response just blew me away. Do Gmail users often not bother putting subject lines on their messages, because the searching is just so good? Is the world starting to divide into Gmail users and non-Gmail users, where the customs of using their systems are different (even though there’s interoperability)? Am I the only person left in the non-Gmail camp?
It seems so strange to me that there are so many people who have never used email that wasn’t a webmail-only-based system. Is there really no room for Internet applications that aren’t web-based anymore?
I think its more about rapid data access. Search capability, not delivery method. As I’ve learned many, many times since I started working in data migration, Corporate America can’t find its data, and Individual America isn’t far behind. That’s why Google is so wildly successful — they provide you access to data you already had access to, just in a far faster and more useful manner.
And in response to your last question, there’s no real room for client-server applications that require thick clients anymore, or, at least, at the moment. Unless there’s some fantastic reason to have a thick client on the user’s machine (such as doing 3D rendering in realtime for a video game), there’s very little economic or design reason to provide a purpose-built client for your application. Right now, HTML and its spawn are the most prevalent and expansive of the readily-available thin clients, and they’re almost everywhere. Perhaps in the future we’ll swing back to Terminal Services of some type, or even back to thick-client applications if the price of bandwidth goes up, but until then, I think WebApps are here for a while.