Introduction of GUI had affected almost all software products. Based on the category, the affect may be anywhere between minimal to profound (e.g. allowed companies create new applications or include compelling features that were not possible before hencechanged the industry profoundly).

1.

Desktop-GUI: The GUI has allowed many companies to create applications that were not possible before. Let me list couple of them. Desktop publishing products from Adobe, such as, Illustrator. Companies such as AutoDesk created CAD design products. Numerous other visual products, such as, power point presentation may fall in this category.

Online-GUI: Hard to predict with certainty, what new killer applications will be invented by others. One must put imagination cap. I would add more, if I get ideas, but, let me speculate some potential candidates from top of my head: Online games, GPS/GIS/Location Based, distributed grid computing/collaboration, online simulation and modeling. As Adobe did in the past, innovative people certainly come up with some thing new that can leverage the online distributed GUI. 

Note: Dr. Cerf (founding father of Internet) said that 99% of the internet application yet to be invented. We think, Pioneer-soft could make lot more money by building one such application than licensing GUI-API and CBSDF. Microsoft makes more money on Office than Windows-OS. So, if we find a high potential application, we may decide to build it. Pioneer-soft like to focus on that, after our Loosely coupled Interchangeable components saves the world from the software-crisis.

2.

Desktop-GUI: The GUI allowed many companies to gain competitive advantage over their competition. For example, among other things, early adoption and control of GUI-API allowed Microsoft to wrestle market share in office productive applications, such as, MS-Word and Spreadsheet, from incumbent leaders WordPerfect and Lotus-123.

Online-GUI: Many companies providing online applications and services. If they refuse to support online-GUI or delayed for long time, it could open doors for startups to gain foothold or clever competitors could exploit to gain market share. Let me provide some examples. Delayed adoption of online-GUI by incumbent players, such as, Intuit and Salesforce.com may allow clever competitor to gain stronger foothold. Likewise, financial services companies (e.g. Merrill Lynch and Charles Schwab), who could provide better investment analysis tools or provide highly customized user interfaces and services, would definitely gain advantage. Many such financial and other online service firms (e.g. travel, retail and entertainment) customer-facing applications, will be forced to at least partially adapt rich GUI components.

3.

Desktop-GUI: The IT applications, which were historically strong hold of mainframes, were transformed in to client-server applications. This also drive down the cost of custom IT applications, which allowed wide spread deployment of custom applications in the fortune 10,000 companies; which were previously only affordable to fortune 1000 companies. This also allowed workstations and PCs to emerge as dominant platforms and drove many previously dominant mainframe companies to niche markets.

Online-GUI: Most client-server and mainframe based applications can now be migrated to online, without lose of any functionality. In fact, our online-GUI technology allows them to build better GUI applications than ever possible before on the client-server platforms. Therefore, most companies may prefer online-applications, if we could offer a viable online-GUI option.

4.

Desktop-GUI: The Mainframes were expensive and costly to maintain. Also the GUI applications offer better functionality, such as, reduced the costs and simultaneously offered intuitive features and navigation to increase the productivity of the users. Also, even far-flung divisions of fortune 1000 can economically deploy client-server applications, which were not economical before, because, purchasing mainframe and just use 10% of the power of the system hardly justifies the investment. Such dynamics allowed spread of client-server to all locations and wide spread deployment of custom applications in the fortune 10,000 companies.

Online-GUI: However, such specialized applications (e.g. supply chain, CRM, inventory, accounting & financials) are still not affordable to millions of small and medium enterprises (SME) and mom-and-pop businesses. Many startups called ASP (Application Service Providers) are hard at work to meet this demand (Long tail of cheap ERP, as Google captured Long tail of online cheap Advertisement market). Their objective is to provide customized applications for monthly subscription (called SaaS - Software as a Service). This model is also called utility computing. The utility computing could make many applications affordable to millions of SME. Also, low use non-core applications hardly justify large investment to build them, even for the fortune 10,000 companies, which can be met by utility computing.

There are millions of SME spending large chunk of money (or stretching their limited budgets) to meet the government regulations. For example, small hospitals and law firms with handful of partners fall in this category. These firms are usually profitable and afford to invest higher portion of revenues on IT applications, and they are forced to meet new government regulations, such as, paperless office. I have seen small hospitals outsourcing EMR-projects to stream line their processes, which is worth about US$200,000 to Indian software companies. They do not fully understand the custom software development dynamics (e.g. not meet their expectations or properly defining requirements and good planning needed to minimize failures) and later costs and risks of in-house maintenance.

Pioneer-soft’s innovative plug-n-play paradigm (or loosely coupled interchangeable components) could allow the SaaS providers to quickly build custom applications on top of their generic application platforms. The ASPs are VARs of the SaaS could build custom components (i.e. CF) for small one time consulting fee. This allows them to support many variants of applications to meet unique needs of each business, and evolve the application as their needs change (by independently refining or quickly replacing loosely coupled interchangeable components).

Unlike character-based interfaces, HTML based web sites would not disappear. The web sites would split into two distinct technologies: HTML would continue to be popular to build static web sites and text based applications (e.g. simple forms and brochures). The XML based graphics would be adapted for graphics intensive applications (e.g. modeling and simulation, command & control systems) and also to display customized up to the minute information visually in many web sites that mostly use HTML.

Speed Of Adoption of online-GUI may be much faster (compared to desktop-GUI). First time around, the GUI platform had taken over a decade to evolve, since; earlier versions offered only limited capabilities and features. Over the decades more and more capabilities are added in each successive release. Also developers had taken long time to over come the inertia and need to be trained in the GUI paradigm. It was slow and methodical process.

Now, we don’t need to educate developers, businesses and users about the benefits of GUI-paradigm. Furthermore, our first releases of GUI-class API will be more flexible and comprehensive than any traditional desktop GUI-class API. Now the software community is matured; and many tried and tested models are in place, which helps any one to quickly deploy the online-GUI applications, if they choose to adapt online-GUI paradigm.

The HTML is mostly text based and not well suited to build many future graphics intensive applications. It is like building Power Point presentation for mainframe; computer that only supports curser based dumb-terminal interface. The few solutions out there today for HTML and Flash are too fragmented and complex (practically unusable to build complex user interface systems).

To build graphics intensive data driven applications we need GUI platform and powerful high-level GUI-API. Today we have graphics platforms, such as, Flash, X3D, SVG and XAML. The biggest missing piece today is a viable GUI-API, which provides: (1). Simple high level component abstractions and process to build complex custom components & (2). Simple unified solution that addresses wide range of disparate complex issues (e.g. rapidly evolving business needs), one encounters in designing complex graphics intensive real-time applications.