G.ho.st

» see g.ho.st as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I missed G.ho.st, and the honest reason is bandwidth. By 2009 I had ttnet adsl at home, which was fine for pages and poor for anything that wanted to behave like a hard drive. A desktop that lives in a browser tab is a bet on upload speed, and the upload speed available in Turkey then did not support the bet.

The idea had a whole category behind it around 2007. Web desktops or webtops, a dozen startups all convinced that the local machine was about to stop mattering. G.ho.st was the one with the best name and the strangest founding story, so it is the one that should get the marker.

It was founded in 2006 by Zvi Schreiber and it ran out of Ramallah and out of Israel simultaneously, staffed by Palestinians and Israelis working on the same product. Contemporary coverage called it the only joint Palestinian-Israeli technology company in existence at the time. Benchmark Capital funded it and the whole thing ran on Amazon's infrastructure, which was itself a novelty for a consumer product in that era.

The pitch was a free virtual computer for every person on earth, aimed squarely at people whose access came through an internet cafe or a shared family machine. That is not a small idea and it was not a cynical one. It lasted eight months in public.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the name ~

Sao Tome and Principe, two islands off West Africa with a population under a quarter of a million, holds the.st top-level domain. Somebody worked out that a company called Global Hosted Operating SysTem could be written g.ho.st, and paid an island nation for the privilege of spelling its own acronym across three labels.

Domain hacks were a small art form in that decade, before everyone gave up and bought the.com. This is one of the two or three best that were ever registered, and it outlived the product in the sense that people who never used the service still remember the address.

~ what it actually was ~

Inside the tab you got a desktop with a file manager and a webmail client in it, plus third-party applications wired in for everything they had not built. Zoho and Google Docs did the document editing. There was a virtual drive you could mount from Windows so the storage looked like a normal folder, and phone access on top of that.

The thin part was underneath. It was a shell over other people's applications rather than an operating system in any sense the word normally carries, and the value proposition rested entirely on your machine being worse than the browser you were reaching it through. That was true for a lot of the world in 2007. It stopped being true fast.

~ what it was betting on ~

The bet was that storage and applications would stay expensive enough that a hosted desktop could charge, or at least sustain, a business. Gmail was already giving away gigabytes. Dropbox launched in 2008 and solved the one part people actually wanted without asking them to move into a simulated desktop. Google put a browser out the same year and then built an operating system on it, funded by a business that did not need the storage to pay for itself.

Against companies that could give the same capability away forever, a startup selling a free virtual computer had nothing left to sell. The category emptied out over about two years and almost nothing in it is still running.

~ the twelve days ~

On 3 march 2010 the email went out. Changes in the marketplace mean that it is no longer economical for us to host the Ghost service, it said, with a closing date on or around 15 march and a short list of places to move to, Google Docs and SkyDrive among them. Twelve days to evacuate the desktop you had been told was permanent.

The company said it would license or sell its technology to larger companies instead of running a service. That is the standard sentence and it means the consumer product is over. What remains is a very good domain name and the small fact of a Palestinian and Israeli engineering team shipping a working product together in 2009, which in the years since has not become an easier thing to do.

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