The other day I discovered another cool Google (GOOG) feature -- one of hundreds hidden away in the search engine's unassuming interface. As I looked for a series of numbers, Google offered to add them up for me. I soon found that it took less time to type a simple equation into Google than to launch and operate my Mac's built-in calculator app, a version of which I've been using for 15 years.

What does it mean when a website delivers this kind of function better and faster than a desktop application? It means the desktop as we know it today is doomed. Screens may get larger, but the boxes attached to them will shrink. The Mac Mini is just the beginning.


Take two recent seismic shifts in the computer market: IBM's (IBM) sale of its PC business to China's Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) announcement that it would pursue profits over market share in selling PCs. Sure, Dell's (DELL) unstoppable growth is a factor in both cases, but they also speak to smart business determinations that the days of desktop PCs gushing cash are coming to an end.


To survive, PC makers will keep cutting costs. But how much lower can they go? Sure, they can squeeze suppliers and redesign plastic casings until both are as thin as tissue paper. At some point, however, they'll have to start discarding entire subsystems. First to go will be the optical drive. Flash memory will be a cheaper and more flexible medium for any data you want to store or transfer locally. Next goes the hard drive: Network storage will be abundant, and the bandwidth to move vast amounts of data will be cheaper than ever. Then PCs will lose the CPU, replacing it with a cheap processor that just shuttles data between the network and the screen, with all the computing taking place in distant server farms. (Sun (SUNW) already offers a stripped-down terminal like this, the Sun Ray, but given the company's lack of experience in selling PCs, I doubt that it will be the dominant supplier of such machines when they become the primary computing platform.)


To be sure, there will still be some personal computers around. Engineers and creative professionals may still require high-powered workstations, and road warriors will still likely tote laptops, though they may shrink so much as to be indistinguishable from cell phones. (Tellingly, in the fourth quarter of 2004, laptops outsold desktops for the first time.) And dirt-cheap desktops will sell overseas for some time. But the vast majority of knowledge workers won't need computing power on their desktop. Everything they need will be on the Net.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It used be that way in the past, because there was no other option. Then came personal computers, with their flexibility that could not be matched by a client-server paradigm in a business environment.

Nowadays, application servers can host office applications without a problem, and if that's all a business needs, then it might make sense for them to migrate. However, any such move would face opposition by the workers.

yea .. but this is not what i think the person is even talking about ... the office environment is extremely viable, specially the business environment where the application in use do not require heavy transfer of information and very little execution.

this person seems to be speaking more in terms of what "web services" are today ...

No, he's talking about future possibilities. The web services today (like the calculator on Google) simply got him thinking.

There are already plenty of examples of this, though. Any large organization has a business reporting environment on remote servers with your computer acting as a dumb terminal that simply shows the results, while everything from the SQL statements to formatting the screen is performed halfway across the country.