AjaxWindows: Most interesting Web OS experiment yet
AjaxWindows, a Web OS and application suite that launched today, makes a very good case for the Web OS. It’s not ready yet for adoption by the world at large, but the idea behind it, and some of the features in it, are too interesting to write off as just yet another science project. Ajax13, the company that makes AjaxWindows, was originally started to create Web-based applications. It made a word processor, sketching program, and a presentation app. Founder Michael Robertson realized that making yet more productivity apps (see also: Google, ThinkFree, Zoho, etc.) wasn’t a Most Likely to Succeed strategy, so he’s rolled these apps into an ambitious Web-based operating system. It worked for Microsoft, I suppose. The AjaxWindows environment is a very convincing (if slower) simulation of a real desktop OS. It lets you (or simulates, I can’t tell) open multiple applications in different windows, and if you expand AjaxWindows to full-screen, it really does look a lot like a real OS, with no visible remnants of the underlying Web browser. But there’s more to it than just looking and feeling like Windows or a Mac. AjaxWindows’ cool tricks are its storage capabilities, its synchronization to your local PC, and its support for other apps and widgets.