With the concept of a “cloud OS” getting ever nearer – if you’re in the Microsoft space, the signs are everywhere: Office Live, SSDS (SQL Server Data Services), WCF, ESB Guidance 2.0 and others in Biztalk Server 2009, Oslo, etc., same goes for the other players, – it only just now dawned on me: I hope that PC manufacturer are taking a long hard look at their business model if they want to survive the next revolution.

If I take a look at myself: much of what I do everyday – with the exception of development itself – I already do using some form of (sometimes fragmented) cloud or cloud-like services. In my case, it’s mainly Google stuff (GMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Picasa, etc.) but that’s simply because they were there first. All of my personal documents are stored online. All of my pictures are stored online. I use Outlook Web Access more than I use Outlook itself. I do my backups on Amazon’s S3 (using JungleDisk). 

So basically my PC (or Mac at home) is not much more than a platform to run a browser on plus a caching service to improve access speed. I don’t really need the latest CPU, 4+ GB of RAM and huge local harddisks. I’ll gladly pay (small amounts) for what I use in storage and other services (and some of them are even free). The need to fork out huge sums of money in one go to replace my local hardware every 18 to 24 months seems to be coming to an end in the very near future. 

Just give me a big screen, a good browser, and a wide pipe to the internet and I’m done.

Actually, it’s mainly my internet connection (I have Telenet at home) that’s holding me back. Cloud computing really requires a symmetric and (virtually) unlimited internet connection. ISP’s don’t seem to understand that yet.