I, too, remember -- and miss -- the days of all applications living on
a central server. Heck, at NeXT, we would run applications from /
Network/Applications/ from anywhere in the world. It was a tad slow
at first, but was just-like-local once the app was warmed up and the
network was stable.
Assuming, for the moment, that the network is stable -- network
downtime not an issue -- there is a major difference between then and
now.
Apps are typically an order of magnitude, if not 2 orders of
magnitude, larger in size, yet our networks are not an order of
magnitude faster then they were 15 years ago. Heck, with wireless in
the equation, our modern networks are frequently the same speed or
even slower than they used to be.
As well, our modern systems are designed for network mobility. On a
NeXT, "mobility" was achieved by tickling a config file
(network=hither vs. network=yon) and rebooting. About the closest to
mobility was OpenStep on a ThinkPad, but therein, Mobility was pretty
darned sketchy.
My MacBook Pro wanders between the Apple internal LAN, external LAN,
my home LAN, and a couple of LANs in between on an entirely ad-hoc
basis and generally without me doing *anything* to prep it for the
move. Having to remember to quite Foo.app just because it is coming
from a fileserver before I can close the lid and go would be a drag!
So much of a drag that I don't do it and, invariably, when I get home
at night, there are 1 or 2 apps from the Apple LAN that crash because
I [inadvertently -- LaunchBar sometimes picks network over local] had
a network app running.
End result; shoving 10x as much data through the same sized pipe
isn't quite the snappy user experience...
...but, even if it were, the *general* expectations of the modern user
is that they can close-go-open and everything will continue to "just
work".
Certainly, network applications are no more or less supported now than
ever. If you have a stable network environment with a machine that is
always on that net, network applications work just fine. There are a
handful of apps that flat out refuse to be installed in a shared
fashion, and that is a drag, but that, too, was always the case.
b.bum
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