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Can Online Spreadsheets and Word Processing Programs Help Cross the Digital Divide
By: Lance Winslow
There seems to be a move on the Internet to have only terminals for Internet users and all the hard drive would be saved at giant Internet hubs. Microsoft would like to have all their programs at get their location and users would pay a monthly subscription fee for things like Microsoft Word and Microsoft XL. This way people could do there creating at their terminal and all the data would be backed up that Microsoft. Also, everyone could interface together since they all had the latest version with the latest features. It makes a lot of sense to do it this way.
Microsoft plans to have this program up soon and now Google is beta testing a similar situation, which would allow you to do essentially the same thing. Why is this good? Well, consider the Digital divide in the world and if everyone just had a terminal rather than a big hard drive with lots of expensive stuff on the computer then they can store all their information at one location.
By doing this, the computers would actually be terminals and it would be very inexpensive to make them, meaning that everyone in the world could afford to have one and everyone in the world could be online and interconnected in a giant collective of humanity. There would be no one who would be without the Internet and this would bring the world closer together in a common cause.
Additionally, it would prevent pirating software and Microsoft would be able to have a steady stream of income and continually upgrade their software without having to worry about people stealing their software code. Google of course is beta testing their similar project in order to head Microsoft off at the pass and compete with them for the new paradigm of computing on the Internet. If all your data was stored you would never have to worry about your computer crashing because everything is backed up somewhere else and safe. Please consider this in 2006.
Lance Winslow, a retired entrepreneur, adventurer, modern day philosopher and perpetual tourist. |
