The Wonsys Blog

Wonsys is composed of three people, we are quite young but we’ve been using the Internet for a very long time. As most of you surely do, we spend most of our days on it (www, FTP, mail, IM, etc.) and we think it goes without saying that you can check a website or look at whatever you want whenever you want. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.

Last Sunday, I wasn’t able to connect to the Internet due to a problem with my ISP, so I was totally isolated — Web-wise, of course.
I don’t consider the Internet to be a drug I can’t live without, I simply happen to think it’s a very useful place where I can work, have some fun, get in touch with other people and read news, so it wasn’t a big issue at first, but it made me realize a few things.

In the past, computers were lonely entities which could easily live alone, but nowadays this isn’t true anymore.
During the last few years, a plethora of Web apps came to life and many of those are used on a daily-basis by millions of people, in many cases replacing the usual desktop applications.

We use many Web apps ourself to manage our business, projects management, sharing documents, managing bookmarks, backups and all sort of stuff. To us the Web has become a must not just a plus.

When I was disconnected, I realized these Web applications are great, but what if you can’t be connected? you could find yourself in big troubles.
In the past, it was easier: if I wasn’t connected, I could work anyway. I had all my documents on my hard disk and I simply had to wait to synchronize my data with my partners.
Today, you risk of not being able to reach your data at all, if you can’t connect to the Internet!

Imagine, you have all of your documents on Google Docs, your photos are on Flickr, bookmarks on del.icio.us, mail on Gmail and your feed reader is Google Reader — I think must of us are in this situation –: you could find yourself with a completely useless computer that doesn’t allow you to do anything because you haven’t got any of your data at hand.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to realize this and this is way a couple of new projects are trying to bring the Web to the desktop: (Apollo and Slingshot). I’m definitely looking forward to both and hope they’ll make life better for us living on the Web.
I’m not a big fan of having everything online and it is for a few reasons: first, because I consider my computer to be much safer, then because I prefer to have all my data with me whenever I need it, not only when I happen to be on the Internet. Sure, it’s very handy, but not all that glitter is gold.

This post is just a friendly note from a person who happened to be without an Internet connection for a few days: give your desktop its dignity back, because the Web is a great added-value but you can’t rely on it completely unless you really have to.
Being connected is great, but make sure you don’t underestimate the consequences of moving everything to the Web, because it could be really bad for your business.

This post was written by Simone D. 1 year, 4 months ago on April 30th, 2007 late afternoon.