Author: Simon Raik-Allen November 18th, 2011 at 11:34 am
I’m often asked about the benefits of new technology, in particular the industry’s latest buzz word – cloud technology, and it’s easy to highlight many. Convenience, freedom, functionality; technology has changed the way we work, play and consume information, at a rate exceeding unlike anything we’ve ever seen in human history. But one of the single biggest benefits that is sometimes overlooked is choice.
No longer do we have to do things ‘the way they have always been done’. Business owners have the freedom to mould technology into a virtual workplace that is a custom fit to the way they like to work. Gone are the days of one-size-fits all accounting, marketing and reporting.
This freedom of choice really heralds an era of the power being squarely in the court of the consumer. And with the increasing use of social media by companies there is a more direct channel between the consumer and the vendor given users are a real voice and hence the ability to influence product road maps more directly in areas that suite their style of work.
One that I’m seeing gaining a bit of momentum is the offline movement. It’s such an important trend. The world has spent the better part of two decades embracing the web, and now we are seeing users wanting to pull back and try to get closer to the desktop.
That’s not to say that we’re abandoning the internet. Far from it, consumers are simply demanding more choice. We don’t want is an internet connection dictating what tasks are available to us. We want to be able to do just as many things offline as we can online, and we want the freedom to choose either.
I can see this emerging consumer trend becoming more main stream as we move into the future, and it’s up to us to keep up with the pace. Here at MYOB we take our mission to ‘make business life easier’ for Aussie and Kiwi business owners seriously, and we’re making it our goal to offer as much choice as we can. Take LiveAccounts for example. It’s a pure online accounting solution, that’s been built to suit those who prefer working predominantly in this space. We’re also bringing cloud capabilities into our desktop product offerings in 2012, allowing our clients to work either online or offline depending on their situation. The feedback we’ve received so far has been overwhelmingly positive – it’s clear that our customers like this type of flexibility and that it suites their work style
Many other online systems have been adding offline capabilities over the last few years. Google a few years introduced a technology called Google Gears which allows web sites to perform offline actions and then synchronize with the server when the user goes back online. Not only did they integrate the technology into a number of their own tools, but it was also rapidly adopted by a number of high profile companies such as WordPress, to allow users to author blog posts offline (e.g., on an airplane), RememberTheMilk to manage your to-do lists, MySpace for message management and various mind mapping and document authoring tools as well.
Adobe is also heavily in this space with their Adobe AIR technology. which allows developers to build applications that run on the desktop (and other places) using standard web technologies, but with online/offline functionality built into the framework. There is now a whole market place of applications around this technology.
The ability to perform online and offline operations within the web browser has become so important it has now been built into the next version of HTML – the computer language that web browsers speak. HTML5 comes with a built-in database and syncing technology so you keep your data offline, work offline, and then sync your changes back to the internet when you choose, or connect. Having this functionality natively built into the browser, rather than with an add-on product like Gears or AIR, will again accelerate the move toward the flexible offline approach.
I think the ability to seamlessly harness the best of the online and offline worlds is just around the corner, and it’s only going to make business life easier for millions of small business owners across Australia and New Zealand.
Personally, I’m looking forward to this shift that will allow consumers to choose when, where and how they want to use their technology. The one down side is however this is the exact reason why I get ten or email from my boss every time he steps off a plane. (like many people, he uses his flight time to respond to emails.) And this technology is only going to make matters worse!
We love to hear what you think, but please note, that by submitting a comment you agree to our comment policy.
Our comments work like a dinner party. Differences of opinion are welcome but keep it respectful or the host will show you the door. If you're rude or abusive, your comment will be deleted. And if you're offensive, you won't be welcome back. We reserve the right to remove any comments that do not comply with our policy. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation.
Chief Technical Officer
An IT practitioner with over a decade of experience in the industry, Simon specialise in bringing leading edge products to market and innovating industries. Simon has a background in Software Engineering and cut his teeth in Silicon Valley...
View Author's Posts
Founder & Senior Writer - The Feisty Empire
As founder of The Feisty Empire, Paul has written, edited, proofed and produced print, radio, online, outdoor and business copy for over 1200 organisations of every size and sector. He is...
Online Editor - MYOB
As resident social media expert and editor of The Pulse, Emma is the online voice of MYOB. With a background in digital marketing, graphic design and advertising, she has a keen interest in...
Social entrepreneur
Social entrepreneur Melina Schamroth is in the business of making a difference. Founder of m.a.d.woman (making a difference), creator of the unique Single Volunteers dating program,...
Social Media Consultant
Justin Flitter has worked with United States based startups, Advertising Agencies and New Zealand companies of all shapes and sizes. Justin leads the Marketing Association Social Media Advisory,...
Need help with your MYOB product or service?
Find out more
A new way to get technical support.
Connect. Discuss. Learn.
Courses and materials
designed to help you make
the most of your software.
Copyright © 2012 MYOB Technology Pty Ltd. All rights reserved
Author
Rachel Kollias
November 22, 2011 at 1:24 pm
Hey Simon – good post.
I think “cloud” has moved past being a buzz word – my 82 year old mother asked me about “the cloud” the other day – her volunteer organisation was considering moving to using Skype for phone conferences in a bid to lower costs.
She’ll be starting a Linked In group soon and Tweeting about their successes !
Author
Simon Raik-Allen Chief Technical Officer
November 22, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Thanks Rachel. Can’t wait to follow her on Foursquare!
Author
Scott B.
November 23, 2011 at 12:59 pm
I’m very confused by your thought processes around the hybrid model, especially when you talk positively about Google’s hybrid approach of Google Gears.
I assume you do realise that Google stopped development on Gears way back in 2010. Today, they announced that Gears would cease working permanently on December the 1st, 2011. ( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.html )
How can you convince us that your software is not trapped in some prehistoric state and your move towards the cloud is just too slow and ill-thoughtout? – people seem to be explicitly abandoning a hybrid model?
Author
Simon Raik-Allen Chief Technical Officer
November 23, 2011 at 11:49 pm
Hi Scott and thanks for you comment.
The online / offline world is a really interesting space right now and is in my opinion the next frontier and certainly here to stay.
The most interesting thing about the “offline” concept is the actual meaning of offline and how it can be used as there turns out to be a handful of different models each with a varying degrees of “offlineness”.
At one end of the spectrum are the always-offline apps. These are a special class of single-page browser-based applications that only work in an offline manner. My favourite application in this space is TiddlyWiki (http://www.tiddlywiki.com/). Its an editable wiki but the data file is stored on your local machine only and doesn’t use the network at all. I use one of these to store blog ideas.
Next there are a class online apps, but with an offline tolerance. They are built so that if you lose your connection temporarily, like you go through a tunnel, they can basically still operate and will sync back to the server when your connection is restored.
Then there are the class of apps that offer formal support for an “offline mode”. This is the main class of applications under the offline banner and now with HTML5 this category will grow rapidly. Typically not all the regular features are available, mostly because its just hard to do and they don’t all make sense when not connected.
There are also a bunch of apps in between these models that use local browser-based storage to either allow for some partial offline capability, device specific storage (like where you are up to in a video playback) or local data cache so that when you do launch your browser-based app next time it can start instantly (by viewing the local data) before it connects and refreshes from the server.
Evernote (http://www.evernote.com/) did a bit of this in their iPhone app when they kept a copy of all notes locally so you could browse your notes, even if you were not online which was a hugely popular feature request.
Speaking of phones, the applications in the iTunes App Store are a great example of the evolution of this space as they are a complete mix of offline, hybrid, and online-only. Some run entirely offline, like the drawing programs. Some run mostly offline with an occasional and optional online component. Many games fall into this category, for example Angry Birds, which you are free to play in a full offline way, but then can go online if you want to submit your high-scores to the global leader board. And many are of course are online-only apps such as YouTube, Weather, News and Stocks.
Google Gears is no longer as you point out, but it was actually never meant to be. They always knew it was only there to fill the gap until the standards-based solutions caught up. Gmail and Google Docs have now been re-written to use the built-in HTML5 mechanisms that Google have now implemented in Chrome, which is obviously a much better way to go.
With so many models, and a whole swag on new technologies, we are only beginning to explore how to best take advantage of this new space and I predict we’ll be seeing a big expansion in approaches before we start to hone in on a common approach.
Our users here at MYOB are telling us that offline is an important part of how they like to work, so we are certainly taking that into account in our product plans.
Author
StevenL
January 13, 2012 at 1:05 pm
Hi,
Is it possible to install MYOB software on an Andriod operating system. For example on Samsung Galaxy Tab ?
Thank you.
Author
ClaytonT
January 16, 2012 at 10:28 pm
Hi
with icloud being a huge focus at the moment for personal use, is possible to run MYOB on Icloud so that it will be able to link up with multible devices(instead of networking) for online and offline work capabilities or is this something that you could see happen in the near future, and also are there apps for ipads and iphones available
Cheers