Virtual Machines & Web 3.0 & Microsoft & Adobe & Online Storage & Web 2.0 Leo on 01 Oct 2007 04:45 pm
Fully Internet Based PCs- Virtual Machines
Adobe has now entered the list of companies providing web-based applications, joining the growing list of such companies as Google and Microsoft who are offering online solutions to applications that in the past have only been accessible on your local hard drive.
I see this as a major indication as to where the Internet is going…
To date, the Internet has evolved faster than anyone could have ever imagined. In the relatively short amount of time that the Internet has been accessible to the general public, it has grown by monumental leaps and bounds; it’s a juggernaut with seemingly indefinite potential. And I see “fully Internet based PCs” as the next step in its evolution.
When I say, “fully Internet based PCs,” I mean the creation of PCs that are just, in essence, portals to your “Internet PCs” or virtual machines. We no longer will have a need for fully featured operating systems or applications to exist on your local hard drive, because one day Internet speeds, along with its accessibility and availability, will be so high-speed it will be able to handle any type of hardware emulation.
Although this idea is nothing new and is happening all around us (Gmail, Meebo, Zoho). I feel that only now is technology becoming available to actually implement these ideas. And though we are not quit there yet, we are moving ever so closer to its full-scale adaptation.
on 01 Oct 2007 at 5:30 pm 1.morduun said …
Of course this is where it’s going: it’s a scam to make users pay more for less, and isn’t that what business is all about?
Maybe someone can explain to me how paying for software by the hour over all the years I plan to use it, instead of just once, is an improvement for me, but I doubt it. It will cost me more: it always does (reference: car leases vs purchasing, apartment rentals vs. home mortgages, etc).
Maybe someone will work out a business plan whereby a company hosts and rents a metric crapton of application servers to users. Maybe they use generic computer sharing technology like Remote Desktop, and just grit their teeth when the user wants to play an on-demand movie. But even in the mystical land of plenty where network transmission speeds can cope with fullscreen uncompressed video streaming, there will =always= be network latency — and =any= latency will make a net-based emulator slower than a machine sitting on my desk. And that’s not even bringing full-on lag spikes into the picture — another phenomenon which will not ever go away.
So no, I don’t think I agree with you. I can see it being a niche, perhaps a sizeable one: dumb terminals with rentable applications for users who do no more than letters to their family, surf the web and play casual flash games. But for Taking Over the World of Computing — especially from the perspective of anyone who ekes even a smidgen of performance out of their hardware — not an option.