Internet trends and computing paradigms are notoriously difficult to predict, but if you've been following them lately you've likely noticed two things that seem to gaining some traction: first is the notion that the PC is migrating to the living room, not new, but undoubtedly persistent. The second trend we've noticed is an increasing interest in virtual machines.
Never one to shy from outlandish statements, Marc Cuban, HDNet chairman and dot-com billionaire, recently posted an interesting vision of the future of home computing. Cuban sees computing moving to game consoles for heavy duty apps that need processing power and the remaining casual apps, email, internet browsing, etc, will be done via internet-VM thin clients — sans dedicated OS.
The thin client notion has been around almost since Turing, but Cuban turns the age old debate on its head a bit by suggesting that the thin client will remain on the PC and the rest of our apps will move to the living room game console. He writes:
It's certainly not that big of a stretch, clearly Microsoft is already moving in this direction with XBox movie downloads and bigger hard drives with every revision. Storage is not a problem, processor power is also not a problem.
The big problem is that software for gaming consoles largely doesn't exist save those hobbyists who've got Linux running on various machines. However, as Apple has long claimed, to be a truly great maker of software you must also make the hardware, and with the Xbox Microsoft is clearly positioned to be able to do just that.
But Cuban thinks that there's another player better positioned to take advantage of this transition — Google. “Google is in a unique position with their datacenters and infrastructure to dominate thin client computing and everything they are doing seems to point in that direction,” Cuban writes.
There are of course a number of obstacles to this scenario, the big one is the lack of bandwidth. As even Cuban admits, the lack of available bandwidth means that this “ain't gonna happen the way things stand today.”
However I've seen a couple of interesting details lately that Cuban doesn't mention that also support his theory.
For one thing the next version of Firefox will support working with online content while offline. This means that office documents from online service providers like Google Docs or Zoho can be edited in the browser even when the machine is offline.
The other thing that Cuban seems to ignore is the drive to mobile devices. It seems more plausible to me that mobile devices as thin clients will replace the traditional PC. The small memory footprint (relatively speaking) of VM thin clients seems to make them ideal for the mobile platform.
Of course, as with any predictive tract, there are some big holes in Cuban's vision, but it's not entirely far-fetched. I do have trouble picturing people editing Photoshop files via the XBox or PS3, but the VM-based web apps as a replacement for desktop software seems almost a given.
As Cuban writes:
