While looking for an interesting conference to attend this Spring, I found an article debating the usage of Flash over AJAX. Regardless of the technologies that will be used it had a good point in the last paragraph:

One thing is certain: the days of when people dismissed Internet clients as hopelessly inferior to native Windows clients are past. Everyone now understands that very sophisticated application functionality can be hosted in the browser, using its native capabilities plus some downloaded code. Applications should no longer be thought of as having a single runtime location: the Web allows them to execute co-operatively in real-time on the client and one or more servers. “It’s almost a new class of applications that’s fully on-demand and fully leverages the desktop,” Bill Appleton told me. “We’re really using both ends of this pipeline very effectively.”

I totally agree. Eventually the majority if not all applications will all be browser-based, server-hosted (loosely connected through web services with XMLRPC) but will still offer rich, user-friendly experiences that we’ve traditionally taken for granted from software that runs locally on our hardware. The evolution of web technologies is going to reach a point very soon where all that is important is having some hardware that can run a web browser to host these applications.

The focus is shifting from the OS compatibility to the applications themselves and the hardware they run on. Mobile and handheld devices are pushing this trend as well, because we need applications that will run on them with nearly the same functionality as on a normal PC. There is still a big religious war (even in my household) over what OS to use, what is supported on one verses another, whether it’s open sourced, and how much it costs (compared to it’s usefulness/stability/security/ease of use). But it won’t be long until it just doesn’t matter. Most likely, the free, open-sourced OSes will win, as long as they have the capability to run some video and audio drivers and a browser. We’re very close to that scenario and closer every day.

There are only a few classes of applications that I can think of that will be very difficult to port to the web: professional graphics editing, 3D modeling, video editing and other processor intensive software. But difficult doesn’t mean impossible.

Overcoming the OS has been a dream for a long time, from Larry Ellison’s suggestion that the future was in dumb terminals to Java’s promise of “compile once, run anywhere”. So what is different about now and the many other times this model has been pushed forward? I think that we’re on the verge of web technologies being robust enough and bandwidth being available enough and storage being cheap enough to enable apps through the browser to be a viable solution for most people’s needs. It will take longer before this will be viable for a corporate solution, but eventually, as hardware becomes cheap to the point where it’s disposable and wireless connection is ubiquitous, everything will be a web application.

So hopefully it won’t be long until it’s a moot point what OS you are using. Which will be a good thing because I won’t have to listen to my husband tell me how wonderful Linux is one minute and the next minute beat his head against the wall trying to figure out how to get the sound to work again because he broke a configuration setting. Nor will ever again I have to stare dumbfounded at my son’s iMac wondering how in the heck to get a context menu to pop up on anything. Life will be so much simpler.

Update:
I’m not the only one who’s seeing this trend: Greg Yardley had some similar thoughts a couple of weeks ago.

Update 2:
Light Reading reports that Google is not going to team with Wal-Mart to make Google PCs after all but there’s a flaw in their reasoning of why not from my point of view.

Some Google watchers question the strategy and timing of Google entering the PC arena. “The profit margins have got to be razor thin,” says Bill St. Arnaud, Internet analyst and senior director of advanced networks at Canarie Inc.

“It will also put Google in direct competition … with Microsoft Corp.”…

“In time, with Web services, more applications will move to the network from the desktop,” St. Arnaud says. “But I think Google has got to first get these applications developed and solve the bottleneck in the last mile rather than competing with Microsoft on the OS.”

I don’t think they’ll have to compete with Microsoft in the long run. They’ll make the OS irrelevent instead.