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January 03, 2007

Why are there no obituaries for rich client applications on the Mac?

[Happy New Year to all my readers! -V]

The technology press loves to publish eulogies to rich client software that runs on desktop computers. The era of the rich client application is over, they say. People are already storing a lot of their computing lives online, on Web applications hosted by the likes of Google. Microsoft, the middle-aged software company, which has become so obese as to take 5 years to produce an operating system upgrade, cannot stem the tide of people flocking in hordes to online counterparts of their flagship rich client applications.

Yet rich client applications are alive and well on the Macintosh. There is a host of rich client applications on the Mac for very specialized purposes despite the existence of online alternatives: buying music (iTunes instead of mp3.com and emusic.com), arranging photos (iPhoto instead of Picasa), instant messaging (iChat instead of Meebo) and email (Apple Mail instead of GMail or Yahoo! Mail). Even sundries like a programmer's text editor (TextMate) are available as full versions only after paying a fee. In a time when free is the new pink and giving away software and services has become de rigeur, let's consider why Macs appear to tolerate the business model of old school, unhosted, shrink-wrapped software much better than PCs.

1. Most Mac users are passionate and picky about user experience. Owning a Mac has never been about the value. Mac users know they are paying a premium for a superior user experience. No matter how much Web technologies advance, a Web application running inside a general-purpose browser cannot beat the user experience provided by a rich client application that accomplishes a small set of tasks with a user interface built for a particular purpose. Rich client applications, for the most part, also have unrestricted access to the local filesystem, which enables them to store more nuanced user preferences.
2. Mac users in general are mobile than PC users. Laptop sales have exceeded desktop sales for some time now. Most Macs sold are laptops rather than desktops; as a result, a higher percentage of Mac users are mobile compared to PC users. Mobility is the perfect antidote to the limitations of most rich-client applications. Think about it: if your choices were between using rich client applications on a computer that you have with you at all times and having your applications accessible at all times on a Web site, wouldn't you rather pick the first and have a richer user experience not subject to the vagaries of reliable Internet access?
3. Enterprises have generally not adopted Macs. Enterprise adoption of the Macintosh platform has traditionally been low, although an enterprise-capable Unix underlies Mac OS X. Rich client applications are usually more problematic than Web applications for an enterprise because they raise problems of versioning, deployment, support and user training. By using Web applications where appropriate, an enterprise can alleviate most of these problems. Rich client applications, on the other hand, work well enough for individual consumers, who don't face the problems of maintaining a uniform environment and policy across thousands of computers. Faced with no such pressure, rich client applications are still suitable for the largely consumer-facing Macintosh platform.
4. Software for the Mac is a seller's market. There is so little software available specifically for the Mac that its passionate users will gladly adopt even intentionally crippled rich client software, so long as it is well designed for the few tasks it can do. Contrast this to the Windows platform, where dozens of third-party applications and online services--many of them badly written--compete for a given market segment. iTunes is undoubtedly a crippled application, whose several arbitrary restrictions can be overcome by open source alternatives. Yet, it is the only way to buy music from the iTunes Music Store. Apple has chosen not even to augment the iTunes user experience with a Web component because its users are happy enough with the experience of a rich client music store application.

Continued adherence to the creed of rich client applications could well restrict the choices available to Mac users because the cost to switch away from a rich client application is higher than the cost to switch away from a Web application.

We are in an age where the operating system a computer runs is beginning to matter less and less because most common needs can be fulfilled online. Rich client applications on the Mac present an interesting counterexample to this trend. Surely a clique of rich-client applications on the Mac cannot swim against the tide of increasing adoption of Web applications? Yet, the Mac may end up making us all "think different" about this question.

Posted by Vishy at January 3, 2007 09:51 PM

Comments

Posted by: Alani at January 3, 2007 10:13 PM