Web applications are making our bond with the operating system ever more tenuous, but an old breed of applications is countering the trend | IslamOnline.net
The cloud is here. Cloud computing, that is. The term is not self-explanatory, but what it essentially means is that more and more of the tasks we could perform only on hard disk-installed applications (apps) are now doable on the Web.
Whether you want to type and format a document, do a bit of number-crunching on a spreadsheet, or view PDF files, Web-based apps from Zoho, Google, or Scribd, among others, would often suffice. In the old days, as in the 1990s until the early 2000s, such tasks were mostly the preserve of applications installed on the hard disk, with Microsoft’s Office suite enjoying, or having enjoyed, a nearly dominant position in that domain.
