The Disappearing Desktop - It's Real This Time

[MisterX]

Rob,

I live this every day...

My code and stacks are on my website. Open to the public.
Those are work, are open to other admins - and given the tons
of logs, you only watch when there's an error worth looking!
 
> Wave of the future or flavor of the week?  Here's a question 
> to help you decide:

> How comfortable would you feel if all your Revolution source 
> code and stack components were stored on somebody else's 
> computer at some site remote from you?

Now, Ajax and co. are services. You're not obliged to store anything.
But for the sake of the argument, you can...

There's or was plenty of "web drives" to store files. imac has this
I believe...

Services is what they can do for you:
- worldclocks
- web calendars
- web contacts (in my email client service for example)
- store Photos or movies to share with others (plenty of those too)
- write emails

Banking, realestate, news reading, etc... lots can be done with
simple services. My mom makes her own custom free business cards 
and gets them shipped free too. Gets reservations for her B&B
via the net too...

What else? Make reservations, find a vacation, a car... 

Sending documents to be printed or offset-printed is 20 years old...
BBS' did that already in the 80's!

IMOHO, services is not where it is going. Economically speaking,
after the information age, we also entered the service age.

Economic growth of services (macro-econ wise) have increased 
substantially since the 80s haven't they? In the enterprise,
we've gone through insourcing, and now outsourcing is more fun!

Funny, I wrote my thesis on IT economics and how a company
could leverage it's cpu power and tools to maximize profits.
I discovered intra-CSID-outsourcing ;)

And tomorrow what's next?

The fact that private data remains private is a major
concern that shouldn't be trivially forgoten. The marketing
empire behind will only be too happy to "categorize" you on
anything you output... Just to provide better services :)

Did I mention all services now come with sponsor labels on
them? It's called advertising... Here comes the brain 
washing age... Believe anything you want, it's the same 
price - free!

cheers
Xavier
http://monsieurx.com