Do you remember what it was like using 3 ½ floppy disks? Typewriters? Rotary dial telephones? Audio cassettes? Will you remember what it was like to use Desktop applications?

I’m a late bloomer when it comes to technology, so it’s actually been ten years since I first used a 3 ½ floppy disk. Up until then I’d been using a typewriter for high school essays and papers. Back then, typos were costly on a final typewritten draft, something which the backspace key on a computer now eliminates. Most of you can probably remember even more “old school” ways of getting things done.

Changes come slowly, then gradually, and then finally all of a sudden, over a day, a month, or even a few years. Well, in ten years, a lot can happen. This is the time frame Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen predicted for a complete shift from the computer desktop to the World Wide Web.

Articles on tech sites in the past month, have been citing Chizen’s predictionfrom his question and answer period at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. And over the span of ten years, you can expect to see this predicted shift.

You can see it happening right now. You can see it happening with Google and its number of web services and mashups. And, much like Google in the early days of the web, Adobe is aiming to be a major player as an online service provider, taking a major step into the Web 2.0 market.

So far it’s latest moves have been a gesture towards this. Their latest SHARE beta project in Adobe Labs is geared towards sharing, accessing, viewing and organizing your documents online as a free web-based service.

In addition, Adobe’s already offering some of its digital editing applications online as services. Even the PDF format is still being improved and innovated with the still on-going Mars project.

Yet as exciting as the prospect of seeing how far we can go using the web as platform is, it’ll be just as demanding in adjusting to the changes it’ll generate. It’ll mean changes in the way you work (as always), in how companies carry out e-commerce and product sales, in server-client processing technology, and further changes in document exchange and storage.

Microsoft, of course, is also looking to gain ground in the Web 2.0 future with its own online storage service, Windows Live SkyDrive, which has been in beta form since late September. Thus, even competition between companies and the services they create is going to evolve.


In my last posting, I looked at the how the interconnectedness of Web 2.0 made an impact on the changes in the PDF format. You can think of it now as a sneak peek of what to expect from the bigger picture. If desktop applications can achieve the same dynamic, connected and richer quality the PDF has acquired for online usage, it‘ll be interesting to see what Adobe will do with its desktop applications.