A few years back Sun came out with the tag line “the network is the computer”. It was at the time Java was doing wonders with it elegance and framework support. At first I scuffed, and thought back to the days of the mainframes and thin clients, who would want to go back to those day!
But it made me wonder and speculate. Java was developed by some very smart people, so what led to the distilled marketing message. While we can merely speculate about the future, one thing is for sure – bandwidth will become cheaper and web based services will address many trivial day to day need. Like these day I use my browser is the most used application on my computer – for email, banking, news and information and research. While I do some development on my computer but I can work with a Vim console on a server. And I find a computer with out an internet connection almost useless. Maybe offline word processing? But then Google just bought Writely – online word processing. No software to install and all your data is backed up (security concerns anyone?) and Microsoft is pushing for “Live” – web based software services. Many cool and useful apps and this is just the beginning.
So what makes the network the computer? A lot of things have to come together, for starters the network itself. Then the protocols and we are in a state of flux at the application and software levels. Today we can develop distributed app (e.g. mash up, SOA, or orchestrated web services) which were just “in theory” just a few years ago. So maybe we all saw it coming but they were closer to realizing it.