Will all software go online?

Yesterday's WSJ noted that Microsoft will experiment with a subscription model for some of its consumer software suites like Office, allowing consumers to pay an as-yet undetermined fee for access to the applications that includes automatic downloads of new versions. This move comes as consumer frustration rises over the need to keep track of product updates and to purchase and download new versions. It is likely also a reaction to Google and a few other players offering free online versions of their own word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software to consumers.

This reminded me of a column I read about a week ago detailing one man's attempt to test the concept that "the Internet is rendering desktop software obsolete." He spent a week using only online applications -- nothing downloaded to his local machine (exceptions were made for FireFox and his Blackberry). It was quite a funny article, but offers some serious food for thought on the direction that the market for software will take. Judging by his experience, we still have a ways to go before all software is served online:

For the most part, I had abandoned Outlook Web Access by the end of the week. Instead of cleaning out my inbox via BlackBerry every morning, I did this several times a day. I set my BlackBerry to vibrate and resorted to using it for nearly all my email. That's where things were on Thursday, when another editor walked by my desk and found me hunched over my BlackBerry, thumbs sore and eyes straining.

"How's the connected-only life?" he asked.

I wanted to vent about every little inconvenience I'd encountered, from sluggish email to disappearing spreadsheets. But after a week of BlackBerry conversations, I had learned to be succinct.

"Not great," I said.

Perhaps more interesting than his frustrations were his successes. For the most part, writing, sharing, editing, and spreadsheeting were possible using online-only applications. As free programs like these improve and proliferate, it will be fascinating to see what happens to pricing for software. Will Microsoft be brought to a place where it has to drastically cut or eliminate prices, or will all of the freeware developers start to charge for access? What will the world look like when we no longer have applications on our desktops? Is such a world possible? I think it is. Where will Microsoft and Google be when that happens?