Long before the Internet became a household word, the founders of Sun Microsystems coined a corporate slogan which – at the time – made little sense: “The network is the computer.”
I thought of that slogan when reviewing a number of web-based applications. Web-based applications are computer software that sit not on your own computer, but are centrally-hosted elsewhere. Nearly everyone reading this article will have at least some experience with what is increasingly being called “webware.” For example, if you use any kind of web-based email (such as Hotmail), that is what you are doing.

So many people use web-based email these days that it is not unusual to meet individuals who are not aware that the traditional way to send and receive email is through special software on your computer (such as Microsoft Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird).
And what was true for email is increasingly true for other applications. Online calendars and to-do lists are often excellent replacements for personal information managers that reside on your PC, such as Microsoft Outlook. (See for example http://www.backpackit.com )
Companies like Google are taking Microsoft head-on with bold attempts to offer web-based replacements for such everyday applications as word processing and spreadsheets. (See, for example, http://docs.google.com)
Of course using any of these applications requires you to be online, so you can forget about using them on the train. But for many workers who take their laptops with them from a networked office back to their networked home, they are in fact always online, and webware begins to become an interesting alternative.
Now why would this be of interest to trade unionists? First of all, you don’t need a powerful and expensive PC with lots of disk storage to work with online applications. And they are almost always free to use, unlike Microsoft Office which costs hundreds of pounds. Indeed, you don’t actually need a PC of your own if you work this way, and organizations can allow people to share a smaller number of PCs.
If anyone is getting a sense of deja vu here, there’s a reason. A couple of decades ago, this is how many of us were working, use low-cost “dumb terminals” working with centrally-hosted software and data storage, rather than personal computers.
No one is suggesting a return to the bad old days of mainframe computers connected to such terminals, but organisations like unions with limited resources and a mobile staff (particularly organisers) should welcome ways to maximise the power of the net and reduce costs using such bleeding-edge applications.
(For daily updates on new webware, check out http://www.webware.com )