Ajax Startup Launches Web Desktop Linked To Gmail

"'What was missing from the market was the notion of the unified experience,' [Robertson] said." I don't understand the obsession people have with cramming thousands of apps into a single site. It seems to miss the point of the web. Isn't it much better for apps to run on their own sites with their own interfaces? Interoperability and sharing data between apps is huge, but the answer is not to put all apps on the same site. What are users supposed to think? "Oo, feature-crippled versions of all my favorite apps!" Web desktops strike me as having the worst of both worlds: none of the feature richness of the web and none of the UI advantages of the desktop. For non-power users, having everything in one place doesn't seem compelling enough to ignore that.

In fairness, the writer may have taken Robertson's comment out of context or altered its meaning, so apologies if that wasn't the fairest launching pad for a rant about web OSes.

First off, you can't call your desktop environment Windows. That's just asking for a cease and desist.

Second, why copy the Windows GUI when you can do something more suited for the browser?

i think where all these desktop copycats fail, approaches like NetVibes and widjets, succeed.

We all know the reasons for that, with the most important being that human kind needed to get away from desktop to web because of the decentralization of information.

oh and the "start" task bar every one of these tries to mimic, is soo 1995...come on, some innovation wouldn't hurt us...

by the way, this thing it crashed my firefox v3...

Web OS will take off when you can run Win32 native apps on them... or GTK apps, or OSX native apps...

What's 'middleware'?

Wow! That's a lot of buzzwords in one sentence.

I just gave a quick look. It looks decent.