Software Developers: Are We Dooming Our Own Future?

The migration from PCs to alternative computing devices has already started in the consumer market. With the gradual increase in availability of web applications that allow you to do pretty much anything you want, it’s appropriate to imagine a world without powerful PCs on every desk (or lap). Instead, it’s very likely we’ll see a consumer market populated by diverse devices with just one thing in common: a powerful, standards-compliant web browser, and a bunch of native apps for things that really can’t be done otherwise.

That’s easy to predict. Everyone is saying that nowadays.
Personally, the only relevant desktop applications that I use are:

• Microsoft Office
• development tools (Visual Studio & Co.).

It’s only a matter of time before web-based office apps will be real, viable replacements for their desktop counterparts. Actually, I believe that most users (including myself, perhaps) would be perfectly fine with Google Docs. It’s just a matter of changing one’s habits (and having ubiquitous connectivity).

Over time, we’ll switch from a world dominated by PCs capable of running just about anything, to a world of web-enabled devices. The only problem is that there will always be a part of the users that will need powerful computers. Developers, designers, architects, engineers, and so on. With PCs sales shrinking, PCs will get more and more expensive, and that will be a problem because if now with €2,000 you can get a monster PC, that will no longer be true in some years from now.

While I can imagine Visual Studio completely built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, it’s very unlikely we’ll ever see something like Adobe After Effects as a web application. I’m not using After Effects as a random example, but as a real-world example of an application that is widely used for semi-professional video editing and post-production. Now think for a moment how many professional-looking videos you see every day, not only on the TV, but on the web. Producing video is now easier and cheaper than ever before because powerful hardware has become a commodity.

The same applies for many other areas, including software development itself. We’re now able to build grand applications that run on inexpensive devices simply because so far we’ve built behemoth applications that required monster PCs to run at decent speed. PCs are now inexpensive because, so far, our users have been purchasing new hardware like crazy. That is partly because Intel’s marketing is very good, but most importantly because, on average, software runs faster on faster PCs.

I’m making a wild prediction, but once that trend inverts and hardware prices will begin rising, making grand applications will be increasingly more difficult and expensive. It’s something that will probably happen in 10 years or so, but what will happen then?