Following on from "my dreamy post from yesterday":http://alexpooley.com/articles/2006/03/07/a-new-world about a purely web based OS, I stumbled across an article detailing "Microsoft's latest search plans":http://theage.com.au/articles/2006/03/08/1141701550573.html . It turns out that these plans are a bit dreamy themselves!
This new search ability will be added to Windows Live, Microsoft's attempt at putting your frequently used Internet services on one page. "More detail here":http://ideas.live.com/.
Here's a couple of the plans:
* A "smart scroll" function that displays all search results at once rather than on separate pages [I imagine like Google Reader's scroll ability].
* A search slider bar that offers previews of data in various forms, perhaps just the Internet address of a Web site, or maybe a snippet of text. As the slider is adjusted, more or less information appears.
Firstly, with their "smart scroll", Microsoft appear to be pushing rich interfaces on the Internet. Good!
But you can also draw some assumptions that Microsoft are making by supplying these types of features:
* Internet connectivity is fast enough to support such features.
* Internet connectivity is reliable enough to support such features.
Those assumptions may not warrant a fully fledged web OS, but they do allow for much more than we have right now. Could Windows Live fail in the same way that Windows Passport failed for identification? Will the AJAX desktop crowd standardise and blow Live out of the Internet waters? I think eventually, yes.
Of course, MS own your desktop (for now) and obviously have a massive advantage because of this.