For the last ten years organisations have been trying to rewrite or replace their core corporate applications with ones which are ‘browser based’. The benefits of this to an ICT department are clear: centralised management and minimal client hardware requirements. What is often not communicated is the cost to the end users.

Very few organisations have installed web-based replacements for their office suite. Ten years ago these applications were seen as too complicated to be effectively translated to web technologies and therefore remained, installed on the desktop. Now there are web-based alternatives to Word and Excel with office 2010, but even they lag behind the desktop versions functionally and they have been a long time coming.

The truth is, writing complex software and modern interfaces using Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies like HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX and JSP is very expensive and unless you are Microsoft with an army of coders, when you do, the results are rarely as good as the desktop equivalent so in the end, users get compromised user interfaces and fewer features for their money. They also, almost inevitably, get immature software, as web development techniques are so fragmented and change so often.

The solution is out there though. More and more people are discovering that, through ‘virtualisation’, it is possible to run full desktop applications either in, or launched from, a browser, with all the administrative benefits and none of the down sides. New technologies from Microsoft (Click Once), Graph-on (Go Global), Google’s NaCl and the Software as a Service model from Spoon.NET redefine the game, allowing you to develop desktop apps and have them deployed in a browser. Corporate favourite Citrix also offers this but at a premium price and is rapidly losing its edge to young, agile upstarts.

Sometimes people dismiss these approaches as not ‘browser-based’ as they usually require a small plug-in or an up-front download on first running. This seems short sighted as this is also true of any site using Flash, like YouTube, Flickr and Facebook – all of which are undeniably browser-based.

There will always be exceptions but for the majority of rich corporate applications the future lies in virtualised desktop apps. Memex is constantly developing and improving our software using the latest techniques and technologies. However, we never adopt a new technology simply because it is the latest IT "buzzword". Instead we concentrate on what we specialise in: providing the best possible user experience, and we leave the deployment challenges to technologies and companies who specialise in those.