Microsoft announced yesterday that within a few months it will launch its first set of Web-based Office applications. According to BusinessWeek “this was arguably Microsoft’s most important Net strategy announcement since it launched the so-called browser war against Internet pioneer Netscape a decade earlier.“

This is a long awaited move from Microsoft, as early adopters and power users have already long discovered the many advantages and benefits of moving apps out of your hard disk and starting to use Web-based applications which can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet.

“When we look back on the desktop software era, I think we’ll marvel at the inconveniences people put up with, just as we marvel now at what early car owners put up with. For the first twenty or thirty years, you had to be a car expert to own a car. But cars were such a big win that lots of people who weren’t car experts wanted to have them as well.

Computers are in this phase now. When you own a desktop computer, you end up learning a lot more than you wanted to know about what’s happening inside it.

Ordinary users shouldn’t even know the words “operating system,” much less “device driver” or “patch.”

There is now another way to deliver software that will save users from becoming system administrators. Web-based applications are programs that run on Web servers and use Web pages as the user interface. For the average user this new kind of software will be easier, cheaper, more mobile, more reliable, and often more powerful than desktop software.“

Source: Paul Graham - The Road Ahead, 2001)

Web-based applications have several advantages over their more traditional downloadable software programs. Here the most important ones I have identified: