Stewart Alsop On Server Side State

Stewart Alsop just wrote another good column in Fortune, this time discussing his trials with Outlook not maintaining state as he moved from computer to computer. An interesting subject and one that merits further thought.

It's 2003 and it's certainly time that software developers started embracing the fact that most users of their apps live on multiple computers (and many of us, multiple categories of computing devices including PDAs, web-enabled cell phones and Blackberries). Very few categories of applications are islands yet we all have to go through the drill Stewart discusses of setting up state from machine to machine. There is no reason that this can't be server side.

Which brings me back to Exchange, the server side of Outlook. I can understand the difficulty of taking a previously client side only application (like the rest of Microsoft Office) and network enabling it. But Exchange/Outlook is the canonical networked application. It already stores megabytes of emails, calendar appointments and address book contacts. How much harder would it be to also store user configuration data?

We are moving to a server side state world. Client side applications are fine, but they are simply the local glue to make server side data more manageable. Or think of client side applications as operating system plug-ins. In many ways, the browser wars of the mid-90's revolved around Netscape's attempt to turn the web browser into the operating system, thereby commoditizing the existing operating systems (i.e., Windows). I would argue that moving data into the cloud (and storing everything in XML) will render not only the operating system a commodity, but also the entire application stack. Which is probably why Microsoft has been in no rush to better network enable Exchange.

But it's certainly no excuse for everyone else. I would switch tomorrow to any application that gives me comparable or even reasonably less functionality than Exchange (or Office or most any other app I have) but was significantly more network aware. My favorite and most simple such app is SyncIt, which does nothing but keep my Favorites folder in sync across all my computers. And given that users are much more likely to pay for a service than software, there's even a revenue model involved. Entrepreneurs, over to you.