Darek Mihocka over at emulators.com has written a series of articles...
In the chapter called "One night in Paris" he explains what he thinks is the next killer app:
I believe it would be the next killer application for some company like Google to provide virtual machine hosting services on the web, for hotels and airports to rent laptop computers, and for yours truly to develop the virtual machine client technology to host virtual machines on any PC, Mac, even my Playstation 3. This would allow one not only to "remote desktop" into a virtual machine, but to actually migrate it (either move it or clone it) to the local computer.
-oBFusC8r
I haven't read the articles yet, but I will. However, I can't help but comment that this is no a killer app, but the return to where we once were,
but in a good way.
This is back to the days of the mainframe.
And what was the
only reason we moved away from mainframes to Personal Computers? Capacity.
At the time, there was no such thing as the Internet and broadband and all such things. Today we can put zillions of processors in a ubiquitous computing cloud (a la Amazon S3/EC2) and a bunch of dumb multi-media terminal at the user's end (a la web browsers) and that reason just disappears. It doesn't matter one bit (no pun intended) where the processing is done.
And most, if not all, of the other concerns become academic, i.e. privacy, diversity of the market allowing you to use the main frame in a manner you desire, etc. once you have an "infrastructure" to support such a ubiquitous computing power. It is analogous to broadcast radio/tv or electricity itself.
It is no surprise that this (the internet et al) all was made possible when open standards begat interoperability which begat comoditization of the underlying infrastructure which begat innovation at the user's end which feeds back into the network in a feedback system amplified by the network effect.
Which brings me to my point that all this talk about "User Generated Content" is just marketing. If users weren't generating content before, where did all the content come from? It is just semantics. "Users" and "Producers" are just roles. By DEFINITION Users use content and Producers produce content. Why is this germane to ubiquitous computing? The "content" has always been there, it has just been poorly distributed.
Which leads to the my next point that all this talk about "Convergence" is just marketing. It has nothing to do with electronic swiss army knives and everything to do with interoperability. People (except travelers) don't give a rat's a$$ about having one device that does everything. All people want is for their existing stuff to interoperate.
Oops sorry. I went waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off on a tangent. I'll shut up now.
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I'm angry about it as well. I went through the same thing back in October.