Interesting Article , and I can see it coming. Web is indeed the next computing platform. We are already doing our banking, taxes, email, online learning, shopping on the internet. I can see the time that we would do our word processing and spread sheets online instead of using a desktop application.

See also Web Based Office and Sun’s Schwartz says AJAX to play a role in OpenOffice. Here’s my bet on how.

There will be a day that we could get CPU power from the internet on demand using the power of Distributed Computing. One could render a movie on a little hand held device, because the client side is nothing but an elaborated GUI, and rendering is happening on a group of servers out there. Believe it or not it is much more secure as well, your request from the thin client is broken down to smaller bits, encrypted, distributed randomly on a group of servers, processed, and return to you and be assembled in one piece. In this model the only way to hack a user’s private information is to read the punched keyboard keys.

That means all the software companies that are focused on Desktop applications will lose some market share to web based computing. How much? let’s wait and see.