There are, of course, already a lot of different applications you can run online, from to-do lists to spreadsheets to photo-editing. Soothsayers and other pundits are predicting that as a consequence, the Great Beast of Redmond will soon be no more, as people abandon Excel and Word for online alternatives. The next step, according to one school of thinking, is entire desktops online. Online applications have a lot of advantages. Unlike the average user (me), these online people will back up your data properly and store it offsite in a fire-proof safe. It’s quite likely that online applications will be cheaper than the ones you buy from a shop, with most people content to look at a few adverts for the sake of access to a free service. In addition, you don’t need a powerful computer to run any of these services – they’re run on the web host – so you won’t need to upgrade to the latest, greatest processor in order to run the latest crop of new applications. Lastly, web applications are available anyware. You no longer need to be sat at a particular PC to view or edit your files, which also opens up the opportunity for collaboration.
Of course, it won’t happen anytime soon. As Paul Boutin points out in Slate (link below), people want ownership of their own stuff. Having the spreadsheet that tracks your finances in your office on your own PC or your own network space irrationally feels a lot safer than putting it on a website. What’s more, giving the people who run the web services the opportunity to poke through your documents feels very uncomfortable. About five years ago, the ‘next big thing’ was thin client computing, whereby we’d all use cheap consoles to log onto server farms where our applications and documents would live. It never really took off because people wanted proper computers and ownership of their own things.
Also, for all the hype, the mobile internet doesn’t really work yet. Yes, around central London you can easily pop into an internet cafe and obtain access. But try maintaining internet access while you’re in the back of a moving car, on a long train journey or a flight, the times when access to your applications, messages and documents would be really useful. For as long as there isn’t 99% reliability, the sort of reliability that you can expect from your home or office computer, then there is going to be considerable resistance to web applications.
Paul Boutin discusses the Google PC in Slate magazine
It makes sense for Google to develop a Web-based PC. To be clear, a Google PC needn’t involve a new gadget like the “thin client” gear of the 1990s. Every computer in the world is capable of running a Web browser. We might not realize it, but we all already have Google PCs.
You could still run Windows on a Google PC; it just wouldn’t matter if you did or not. Most Google PC rumors imagine a low-priced, Windows-less, entry-level computer for the Wal-Mart set. That could be part of the plan, but it would just be one more option. Instead of trying to convince every consumer on the planet to buy a new machine, it makes a lot more sense for Google to build a super-service that you could log into from any computer, phone, or television, or car and airplane seatback. You would be able to access your files anywhere by logging in, calling up your desktop, and popping into Google’s array of Gmail-like applications for word processing, photo editing, and anything else you can think of.
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