Face First: The Digital DesktopBoth personal and collaborative application service providers are likely to face the problem of customer churn. The ubiquity of their applications and their position at the bottom of the application complexity continuum (see Figure 1) suggest that these service providers will have to lean heavily on the "stickiness" of their interface to keep customers down on the farm. Digital desktops are designed to keep the customer feeling at home and in control wherever and whenever they log on.
The barriers to keeping customers are related to the barriers involved in acquiring them in the first place. ASPs in the personal and collaborative end of the business must address issues around the look, feel, and performance of applications delivered over the Web. They will also have to overcome people's reluctance to give up control of their private information. Both of these concerns are inherently psychological as well as technical. Several companies have recognized this and are designing interfaces to help bridge these obstacles. Carving Your Initials Everyone who has worked on a PC for any length of time has configured the "desktop" to look a particular way. In addition, people who work with PCs almost always configure their machines to have the applications and features they use most at the top of their interface. By presenting a user's favorite features in the same manner and style as a home PC, digital desktops allow users to access applications over the Web in a comfortably familiar environment. Users are given features such as virtual drives that allow functions like editing, saving, and opening files to be done in essentially the same manner as they are on a PC. The difference is that the actual residence of the data may be many leagues distant. For enterprise customers, the digital desktop also allows for the propagation and support of brand-related iconography and lends a proprietary look to a business' computing environment. Just Like Being There Katie Burke, CEO of Desktop.com told the ASP Advisor "Our founding idea was that as Web based delivery of applications catches on people are going to want better ways of aggregating and accessing their Web applications. We thought we could bring them parts of the Web like content publishing and aggregation, together with the power of the desktop environment with icons, drag and drop, and pull down menus. We're taking applications distribution past the page modal concept of the Web and building a fully functioning virtual workspace. We specifically thought about how to help ASPs differentiate themselves and so we provided them with the development tools to brand themselves or their customers in this environment." Safe at Any Speed "We have positioned BmyPC as the interface between Web-enabled devices and Web-accessible applications by providing access to a virtual desktop environment from any device," said Yossi Cohen, BmyPC's CEO. "We developed a solution that is platform- and browser-independent and light enough to load in six seconds. Our technology polls the browser and tailors the applications to suit the device, providing a full suite of applications for desktops and laptops and a lighter suite for handhelds. Virtual computing makes file management straightforward even from WAP phones. Files can be forwarded directly from the server without having to be uploaded then downloaded. When the user logs on, all of their applications will be available through the use of secure passwords, and, at the server level, all the clients’ data is encrypted." Don't Leave Home Without One If the Web is the latest and greatest evolution of humankind's desire to shape the environment then it is likely that people will want to be residents of the Web as permanently as they are of any neighborhood. They will want to be able to find familiar features, faces, and relationships wherever they go. Why else would there be a Starbucks in Paris or an AOL? — Tom Gilmore Related Research
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