ShareThisA couple of days ago I linked to a presentation that Bob Sutor presented at Linux World and that along with an article I read today on Wikinomics about how Web 2.0 applications might save businesses in current recession invited me to think of where we are going with what up to now has been called the desktop. Many if not all of the tools most of us need in our day to day communications exist or can exist on someone else's data center. It's possible with Google Apps to outsource your mail and messaging. It's possible to use Google for nearly everything except large SQL databases at this time. Amazon's S3 has invited me to store my data in a cloud. I store nearly all of my pictures on Flickr. I can share my PowerPoint presentations on Slideshare.net or Google Docs. If I choose slide share then I can share them with a larger community. All of these web hosted applications really invite me to redefine what I need to connect to this. Of course all of this fosters collaboration and lets us form collaborative dynamic ad hoc groups that coalesce around projects and then continue to change and be reconfigured as new projects are needed. I could get by with an appliance that uses only an SD memory card as a boot device. I probably can use wireless or wired ethernet. I can also get to this data cloud with my Blackberry or other PDA. My operating system whether proprietary like Windows, Macintosh, RIM or open source as in Linux is really only important if it doesn't support connections to the cloud. Asus currently ships a motherboard with embedded Linux, so I really don't even need a disk drive or even a memory card to boot to an operating system that can get me to the cloud. It doesn't really matter if Linux makes it to the desktop. It's in the data center and if you check many of these clouds are running on a LAMP stack or at least on an open source OS whether Linux or FreeBSD.