Fast Company
( March 2000 )

The Battle for the Soul of the New Economy

Several startups are getting a jump on their Goliath-size competitors. Desktop.com and myWebOS.com are each online with new -- and, so far, free -- sites promising to bring a full ( and fully accessible ) working environment to the Web.

Desktop.com and myWebOS.com work in a similar fashion. After logging onto the site using your name and password, you're presented with a screen that has the familiar windows-and-icons setup of a Windows or a Macintosh operating system. As with a PC or a Mac that has software stored on its hard drive, you can launch programs, load files, create or edit documents, and save your work. The critical difference: All of this occurs within a Web browser, and your files and programs reside on a distant server, not on a local hard drive.

Although Desktop.com offers the snazzier interface, myWebOS.com is further along in providing the features of an online office. At press time, the company's HyperOffice was expected to include such staples as word processing, spreadsheets, databases, presentation graphics, group calendars, and email. ( The early beta version included only HyperWord, email, and a few extras. ) In addition, myWebOS.com provides several third-party programs, including employee-management and travel-expense software.

In contrast, Desktop.com doesn't offer any mainstay applications, and it doesn't plan to do so. The company says that it hopes to entice third-party developers to create office programs for its platform, although nothing further had been announced at press time. Instead, Desktop.com is showcasing more ancillary software packages, such as a day planner and a news gatherer.

Early versions of these programs leave ample room for improvement. My beta version of myWebOS's HyperWord, for example, can be maddeningly slow: There is often a slight delay between the moment when I press a key and the moment when a letter appears onscreen -- even when I'm using a high-speed cable modem. And HyperWord doesn't have nearly as many the bells and whistles as Microsoft Word.

But those shortcomings will almost certainly be addressed as the software matures. And there are some compelling reasons to hope that they will be. myWebOS.com says its HyperOffice programs will always be free of charge and they will be compatible with Microsoft Office programs.

Better still, HyperOffice is by definition as ubiquitous, and as agnostic in regard to operating systems, as the Web itself. Even at this early stage in their development, Desktop.com and myWebOS.com offer a tantalizing taste of the kind of independence that could define computing in the near future