Living in the Dual Mode

Marc Orchant has picked up nicely on an article by David Berlind on the topic of working while connected to the net and the need to work where net access is not available.

I agree with Marc. It is really good to see a move to so many applications like Google spreadsheet, Microsoft Live,  and Writely available on the net, but the reality is that I still find myself in situations where I need to work, but I still don’t have access to the net.

Perfect example: I was giving a demo yesterday to a group and the restaurants wi-fi was going in and out. So I plugged in my verizon evdo / cdma card. I didn’t have evdo coverage there, and the cdma coverage was a bit worse than dial-up. I got the job done and it was only a presentation, but had my files resided on the net, I would have been in big trouble. Fortunately, I only needed the net for a portion of what I was doing and had my local files available.

These are problems that can get worked out over time, but I just don’t see a time coming really soon where we will be giving up our tablet pcs and totally relying on the net for access to our files.

Where the work really needs to take place is in the syncronization of my online and offline files. Dual modality is here to stay for quite a while – figuing out how to make that as transparent of an experience as possible is the key.