Getting rid of the Start Bar

I always thought that reducing the complexity of business applications within an organisation was kinda simple. But maybe first I should take you on a little history lesson.

Many years ago while working for the leading PC server manufacturer (sure you know who that was?) we heard wind of a new technology that was coming our way. It was called "client server technology" and was destined to revolutionise the delivery of business applications.

What happened was really weird.

Being PC guys we thought this technology would move the applications away from PC's - because that was already looking like it didn't scale and was hard to manage - by moving the processing to servers.

Unbeknown to us though on the other side of the computing world the mainframers were saying “At last we have a way of shedding customisation away from our lumbering servers. Let's build all that stuff into a PC client and then we can save time customising our loping applications.”

So when these wonderful new client server applications arrived, I was expecting things to get easier and they just got harder. I remember being exasperated to discover that the new ERP client that was being rolled out in the company required a doubling of PC memory and maybe even new PC's to cope with the processing requirements. What was that all about!

This trend has continued and the need for client side PC applications to front-end server applications continues to be the easiest cop-out for software companies. Allowing them to solve the problems of customisation and application flexibility.

How does this affect the complexity of our environments? Well what it does is guarantee that our friends in Redmond are a crucial part of application delivery. They're not daft are they?

The promise of web applications has also faltered in the corporate world. Software companies tried to use funky bits of technology delivered with specific browsers which have since been dropped. Talk at a recent seminar on “our friends” new Version 7 OS explained that it was going to be possible now to run older versions of their browser in an isolated environment to protect customers with legacy browser applications. Not sure about you but that whole sentence just makes my skin creep!

I always thought that if we could remove the need for a Start Bar (or any hook to legacy PC environments) to deliver our business applications then we have far more options to rationalise delivery to clients – and that means simpler and cheaper. Even though current web application technologies allow us to do everything we need, those PC lock-ins still proliferate.

So next time your choosing a server based application add the "must be accessible through any web browser" to your requirements list and just watch those responses drop away!