It will not be google, nor yahoo!, nor microsoft but Transmedia. Phew, interesting times these days, eh?
TransMedia Plots Death Of The Desktop in InformationWeek.
The Glide suite, due later this month, runs on the vendor’s own servers and is accessed through a browser. It includes applications for creating, sharing, and selling photos, music, video, and documents, as well as doing content management, calendaring, E-mail, and conferencing. Can TransMedia beat Microsoft and Google?
The software, disclosed in mid-October, is called Glide Effortless. It’s a set of 12 applications for content creation, communication, E-commerce, and sharing. The apps are Glide Photos, Glide Music, Glide Video, Glide Docs, Glide AllMedia, Glide Contacts, Glide Calendar, Glide Timeline (Glide’s search engine), Glide Mail, Glide Cast (audio, text, and video conferencing), Glide Share, and Glide Shops. Because the apps were developed simultaneously, they work in concert with elegance not evident in other loosely linked software programs like Apple’s consumer media applications or Microsoft Office.


Glide is browser-based and thus can be used on the three major PC operating systems — Linux, Mac, and Windows. The Mac-compatible version is coming Dec. 25. In January, Glide will be available on portable devices such as cell phones. Shortly thereafter, it will run on digital set-top boxes.
The software is available in three plans. The free plan includes Glide Mail, Glide Contacts, Glide Shops, Glide Photos, Glide Music, Glide Video and Glide Docs with 50MB of storage. The standard plan, $4.95 monthly or $49.95 annually, includes all the apps except for video and audio conferencing, with 750 MB of storage. The premium plan, $9.95 monthly or $99.95 annually (which compares favorably Apple’s .Mac service), offers all 12 apps and 2 GB of storage.
Glide’s applications are designed to promote viral marketing through drag-and-drop sharing. For example, shared 30-second streaming song snippets include a “Buy Now” button for the purchase of officially sanctioned song files from participating content providers. Leka says his company plans to introduce a service in December geared toward bringing independent artists into the system.
First, Glide might make Linux PCs viable for technically unsophisticated users — they’d just live within the Glide environment. Second, software service providers like AOL, Google, MSN, MySpace.com, and Yahoo, to name a few, might face reinvigorated competition from cable and telecom providers that suddenly have something to offer subscribers beyond increasingly commoditized network bandwidth. Finally, widespread adoption of Glide could further erode the value of Microsoft’s desktop dominance.
Those are speculative scenarios to be sure, but stranger things have happened.