Raju vegesna’s Blog

I think Widgets will be a big market in years to come. By Widgets I mean, small utilities, embedded into OS at different levels like desktop, windows etc.

Look @ http://www.konfabulator.com/ for an example. They have some excellent widgets. Now apple is including widgets for its new OS Tiger (http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html). I am sure Microsoft will include (copy?) these into Longhorn.

Well, by 2006, we can assume that managing widgets will be similar, if not worse, than managing programs on our operating systems. While OS itself will bundle some cool and useful widgets (like Time Zones, Weather, search etc), I am assuming that product vendors will jump into this market offering their own widgets to get decent space on customers desktop.

I can give a simple example on how a company like AdventNet can create some cool widgets. Lets consider a product like OpManager (opmanager.com) which is used to manage servers, routers, switches etc and informs an IT guy for problems. A software like this is a good friend for an IT guy. By creating an OpManager widget, AdventNet can provide this as a value add to the product and the IT guy can add this widget to his desktop. By doing so, he’ll get summary views of his networks from a single useful widget on his desktop.

While this is one application of widgets, I can think of many others. I beleive there will be many new vendors coming up creating new widgets for multiple OSs and Softwares. While this market might take off soon with Apple’s new OS, it should reach its peak with the release of Longhorn.

Raju

I came across a small and interesting software build on top of Gmail which will let us use gmail space as a virtual drive.

http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

Well, this made me think if Google will officially launch a virtual drive service for free using the same offering? They might as well do it. They have already provided 1GB space for free and many users dont use this space. If they provide an ability to use this space for saving documents, that’ll be a killer of many users whose docs are struck to home desktops.

Google seem to have the basic infrastructure in place. They might as well surprise the world again with gdrive.com or something similar. Lets wait and see….

Raju