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IT | John Tate | 26 Sep 2008

John Tate reflects on the upgrade cycle.

A little over three years ago readers of Charity Finance may recall I purchased a new Dell laptop. Overall it has done a good job. However, I now need to upgrade my machine and a new device will land on my desk in the next few days. I will be loading Vista, which presents some challenges.

The home user is getting pretty used to Vista but business/larger charity adoption is still proving slow. The look and feel of Vista is different from XP and will take some getting used to as will getting all my software applications running correctly in this new environment. Microsoft has recently announced its next generation of operating system, Windows 7, so I have a feeling the next laptop isn’t going to be around forever.

My late Grandmother purchased a state of the art Frigidaire fridge/icebox cabinet in the early 1960s. She claimed that this worked without a single fault for 25 plus years. No upgrades, no maintenance and no support. When I purchased my current machine it was state of the art at the time, but the Vista operating system requires even more power, hence the new machine. And lots of maintenance along the way.

With my current laptop a major issue was when I first tried to configure the system. One of the problems I had was setting up my Dell to work with all my software applications, which run on my desktop device. It took several days to get everything working including my device/port settings and contributed to a sharp rise in my blood pressure. Hence I am somewhat nervous of the impact of getting my new machine. Surely technology should not be so complicated? Computers have been around for several decades and a mass market device like a PC should not need to be so challenging to install, use and support.

Which brings me onto the continued development of web-based applications. Are these going to be a real alternative that will lead to the demise of the complex and expensive desktop device? Browsing in my local DSG (previously Dixons) shop there are a number of cheap portable devices that run open source software and are designed for mainstream web working. These machines start at around £200 and have wireless connectivity to give them good web access. Some of this price saving is achieved by not having to buy Microsoft licences. Other savings are realised by being able to use a lower specification machine to run and store applications on the web.

Google recently launched Chrome as its alternative to Internet Explorer (IE) from Microsoft. Google claims Chrome is faster, more secure and reliable than IE and suggests is the platform for the future to run web-based applications.

Google continues to roll out business applications in its own right including email, calendar, word processing and spreadsheets. There are a number of commercial and not-for-profit organisations who have switched over to these tools in preference to the likes of Microsoft Office. More will probably follow.

Google is also supporting third party vendors in getting their applications running in the Google environment. NetSuite, for example, announced last month that its application will be supported on Chrome. NetSuite is a US based developer of accounting software. It floated late last year and its initial market capitalisation was $2.1bn. Not bad going and shows the interest in ‘software as a service’.

Earlier this year Google also announced the beta release of its App Engine software, which allows third party developers to write and host web-based applications in the Google environment. There are hundreds of software products now being developed globally using this technology.

This may go some way to explain why Google’s market capitalisation is approaching that of Microsoft. At the time of going to press Google was valued at $140bn compared to Microsoft at $239bn.

Despite all this I have purchased a conventional laptop. I will be able to work wherever  I am without needing an internet link and I will be using applications I am familiar with. Next time around it may be different. In the meantime look forward to the day when upgrade cycles mirror that of my Grandmother’s  fridge.

John Tate is a leading IT analyst in the charity sector and chair of Citra

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