PC World
( Wednesday December 1 1999 )

Free Web service hosts your fully functional computer desktop.
by Liane Gouthro, PC World

Is your computer desktop tying you to your desk? A laptop might run your applications when you travel or work at home, but what about all of your files and settings? Wish your computer desktop were portable, too?

Now it can be, with MyWebOS. Launched Tuesday, this free service enables you to run a virtual desktop from a Web server. Anywhere you have Internet access, you can have your desktop. Shervin Pishevar, the company's president and chief executive officer, touts MyWebOS as "the world's first Web operating system."

With MyWebOS, all your applications reside in a virtual desktop on the Web. MyWebOS provides Hyperoffice 2000, an office productivity suite with a word processor, e-mail, a calendar, and a contact manager. Also included is Dialpad, which lets you make free long distance calls from your PC, and Orbit Commerce, an online store-builder. MyWebOS offers 20MB of free storage space to all users.

Additional applications are available for a fee. Among them are Employease, an application for human resource professionals, and Expensable, which allows expense report management. The developers rent out these applications; MyWebOS simply re-rents them to its users at the same price.

"We want to democratize the software market," Pishevar explains. "There are no demographic barriers."

Run It on the Web

The idea of hosting applications on the Web has gained attention recently. Sun Microsystems is making its Star Office suite available on the Web for free, and Microsoft recently announced its Office suite would be available (for a fee) on the Web.

But MyWebOS.com differs, as Pishevar explains. This is not just an office suite on the Web; rather, it's your entire desktop residing in cyberspace.

"Their mentality is trying to push fat applications through the Internet," Pishevar says of Microsoft and Sun. "We are building an application right through the heart of the Internet."

You make a trade-off when you choose a Web-based application or workspace, says Lucas Graves, an analyst with Jupiter Communications.

"The key benefit is that you can access your computing environment wherever you happen to be," Graves says. But hosted software "is always going to perform worse than software that lives on your PC," he adds. "Fundamentally, there is no way to get around the bandwidth and CPU obstacles." He expects that to be the case--for the foreseeable future.

MyWebOS.com appears to be blazing new cyberground. Pishevar notes that the site's closest competitor is a service called Desktop.com, which was launched earlier this fall. He considers Desktop.com targeted more at consumers, while MyWebOS.com is designed to meet the needs of businesses.

"We don't carry ads," Pishevar says. "This is a business atmosphere, a professional space."

The challenge is coaxing users to abandon the security of their desktop environments and venture into a virtual desktop. And whether the often slower performance of a Web-based application is worth the mobility it offers.