ZeroPC

» see zeropc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The webtop was a category I read about for a decade and never once moved into. Around 2011 I was an engineer with a real machine in front of me, and the argument for putting a fake Windows desktop inside a browser tab never survived contact with the fact that I already had a real one. ZeroPC was one of the better attempts at it, which mostly meant it understood that the interesting part was not the desktop.

It launched at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on 29 march 2011 and opened to consumers that september, out of a company called ZeroDesktop in San Mateo run by Young Song, who had co-founded eMachines and then founded NComputing. The product was a browser page dressed as an operating system, with a taskbar, draggable icons and a file manager, all of it drawn in HTML and JavaScript with a Java backend on Amazon's servers.

What made it worth using was the aggregation underneath. Your Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, SugarSync, Evernote, Flickr and Facebook photos were pulled into one file view, so files from six services sat in one window and could be moved between them by dragging. There was a universal inbox for mail and social messages, an office suite bolted on from ThinkFree, and a password-protected folder for anything you did not want in the open. The pricing was the strangest part and the most honest: no subscription, roughly a dollar a month for what you actually stored and moved, with ten dollars of credit thrown in at signup.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

For about two years it looked like a real position. Cloud storage in 2011 was a mess of accounts that did not talk to each other, and something that could show all of them at once was solving a problem people actually had. ZeroPC picked up users in more than fifty countries, added Android and iOS apps, and pivoted a version at schools and small businesses as a private cloud.

The company's own framing was "a transferable, lifetime web desktop", which is a promise nobody in this business has ever kept. The bet was that your machine would eventually be a thin thing that only ran a browser, and everything that mattered would live at an address. Half of that came true. The half that came true went to Google Docs and to the phone in your pocket, neither of which needed a picture of a desktop to sell the idea.

~ the unraveling ~

Aggregating other people's storage is a business that sits entirely on other people's goodwill. Every service ZeroPC connected to spent those same years building its own web interface, its own mobile app and its own sharing, and each one of those made the middle layer thinner. Dropbox did not need a desktop drawn around it. Google Drive shipped an office suite that was better than anything a small company could license.

The skeuomorphic desktop aged badly too. By 2014 the visual language of the web had gone flat and mobile, and an HTML replica of a taskbar looked like a costume. The idea underneath, one view over many storage accounts, was fine. The idea on top of it stopped being a selling point and started being the reason people did not try it.

~ how it actually ended ~

NComputing, the parent, moved to selling a hosted virtual desktop service, which is the same promise sold to IT departments with a purchase order attached. ZeroPC did not fit next to it. The notice went up telling users that accounts were effective only until 31 may 2017, that they should back up anything stored in the service before that date, and that recurring charges on paid plans had already been cancelled.

On 1 june 2017 the servers were switched off and everything personal was deleted: files, usernames, passwords and the connections to third-party services. It was signed off by the ZeroPC Team at ZeroDesktop, Inc., an NComputing Company, which is the corporate paper trail of a startup that has been absorbed doing the last polite thing it will ever do. The shutdown notice is still the only page left at the domain.

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