this is the personal blog of brandon quintana.

The New York Times had an article about AJAX web applications on the web to use in place of desktop applications. The article says computer hardware has reached a point where its very inexpensive to pick up a pretty good system. The software however ends up costing even more than the hardware. Google has bought Writely a web based word processor and also released a preview of its spreadsheet software.

The article says Microsoft won’t be far behind in its Live software in bringing more desktop like applications to the web.

The web applications are pretty bare-bone at the moment, but for most people it is good enough for them to get basic work done. The best part is that most of the web services are available for free and are pretty well integrated into the developers existing systems.

An example of this is how well knit the Google applications are with each other as well as the Yahoo applications. All use the same logins and in some cases are able to send information back and forth between each other.

There are many other competitors creating similar products so if you don’t like the mainstream vendors products there are always other options to choose from. This is another example of how Web 2.0 will change the industry this year. It will make software more universal opening the audience to a larger customer base.