Think about the software you use day to day. Depending on your profession and interests, what you use will vary, but some applications tend to show up over and over again. Microsoft Word and Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, various web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, Skype, iTunes, and so on.

When it comes to those widely used, highly established desktop applications, think about how long it’s been since they first saw the light of day. Many of them are practically ancient.

To give you a taste of how old they actually are, we selected a sample of 12 popular desktop applications: Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Photoshop, Internet Explorer, Opera, MSN (Live) Messenger, iTunes, OpenOffice.org, Safari, Skype, Firefox, and Chrome.

So how long have these applications been around? We rounded up to the nearest full year:

Quick observations:

• The oldest of the bunch, Microsoft Word, has been around for 27 years.
• Four of the apps above have been around for more than 20 years.
• More than half have been around for over a decade.
• Only one has been around less than 5 years.

This is a small sample and isn’t meant as a deep statistical analysis. We just wanted to show that when it comes to widely-used, installed software (ignoring operating systems and web apps), most of the more popular applications have been around for a very long time.

The point is: There are very few new big hitters.

Mindshare domination

Today’s most established software applications have the benefit of having been around and continuously developed for many, many years. It can be pretty hard for newcomers to compete with the vast feature sets and the enormous mindshare these applications have accumulated. Creating a new Photoshop wouldn’t be easy.

If you look at operating systems it’s even worse. Even the relatively modern Mac OS X has strong ties back to good old BSD Unix and NeXT. Try launching a brand new operating system today… Good luck.

All this doesn’t mean that new applications aren’t successfully invading people’s desktops. Dropbox is a recent example of an app that is becoming quite popular. Google’s Chrome browser is another one. In less than two years Chrome has passed Apple’s Safari in terms of market share. Interestingly, both Dropbox and Chrome are tied to the web.

Which leads us to another question.

Installed apps vs. web apps

You can’t help but wonder if much of today’s innovation is simply happening online instead of on the desktop and if that is one of the reasons why our most popular desktop applications are so old. Developers are choosing to develop for a platform that is automatically cross platform (the web).

And there’s another huge upside to using the web as your platform: users don’t have to install anything. This makes the threshold for starting to use an application much lower, which makes it easier for new applications to gain users.

Could it be that the shift to running more apps online will prove to be the proverbial meteorite that finally wipes out the domination of the old desktop application dinosaurs…?

Photo credit: T-Rex by Scott Kinmartin.

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

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The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

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Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

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