But this is not the whole story.

Look at how hobby kits finally became respectable: not with the ad-hoc hacked-up first iteration legacy which resulted in a 20-year detour through DOS/Windows 3.0, Apple II/Macintosh. People often say that the PC revolution began in 1975, but all the systems commonly used today do not go back that far, they trace back to de novo R&D from the late 1980s / early 1990s that attempted to emulate workstations rather than make toys. Besides NeXTstep, which became Mac OS X, there was NT OS/2, which later became Windows 2000. Even GNU/Linux, which is the most UNIX like of all, came out with its first distribution in 1993. This is remarkable. It means that toys could take over the world, but cheap hardware alone was not enough, blindly ported software wasn’t enough, hacked together software wasn’t enough, it had to be well-engineered software made specifically for the device and its new usage scenarios — something that wouldn’t have been known until people played long enough with the toys.

So today, we have mobile devices that are still consumer toys for the most part. But like an old movie, the gap between mobile devices and PC’s is closing; the case for PC’s and PC companies is increasingly enterprise customers; and attempts to shove a downgraded PC directly into a mobile form factor like Blackberry/Windows PDA’s and netbooks are not working as well as making toys more powerful. Some things don’t change. New usages like electronic payment, geolocation, and image search are clearly emerging from the toys, and there will be a second iteration of development that make mobile devices seriously useful. It won’t be through making them do all the things that can be done now on the PC though — that would be impossible — it will be through making them do things that make things now done on the PC obsolete, because there will be better ways. The next ten years should be interesting.

One is to use all services that Google provides, which are entirely built on web applications. I don’t believe this is the right model.

That guy in the link was able to “survive” for a month, sure, but only because he had very boring things to do. The amount of stuff I have installed on the desktop are not going to be services anybody is going to provide any time soon. Besides, it is almost impossible to get people to change set habits to use a whole new set of cloud software. Are you kidding me? Change all the software you use? This is a no go.

The more promising model is virtual machine hosting, in other words, the Citrix on crack model. To a large extent, I already roll my own using Remote Desktop and an always-on machine. But much more useful is having a huge server farm hosting lots of virtual machines that belong to users … possibly sharing installed software and other redundant stuff. This is a “compatible” path, in that users will not see any difference from their desktop experience and so will adopt it. Once they adopt it, you can tweak the backend however you want to wean users off of the desktop. This is something that many companies are trying in different forms, and of course so is one particular large desktop OS manufacturer … that happens to have server software also, and which happens to support virtualization. So I wouldn’t write off said company just because there is a cloud.

Incidently, Google is now supporting offline mail because they find it necessary to support the blended cloud/offline experience.