This is a great insight. Today's "apps" are more similar to terminal based services on a mainframe than they are to the 'applications' that were running on individual computers.
When you look at the architecture of the infrastructure for a Google or a Facebook you see what are essentially data center sized computers that you can walk through. We have a smart terminal called "web browser" that accesses them :-). And things like ChromeOS and Chromebooks take that to its logical conclusion. Oddly enough I got an early sense of this using a Heathkit H89 which was a terminal with an embedded CP/M computer. Where there was a CP/M program providing the user interface while talking over a slow serial link to a data server. Others got to experience things like the Minitel. Crude by today's standards but heading down the road we currently drive on :-).
The corporate challenges of having everything in the mainframe (competing with others for resources, paying a 'tax' to IT for running the mainframe even if you weren't using it, information accessibility that you did not control, Etc.) pulled PC's into business when people could do their jobs on them and didn't need to use the mainframe. Given similar sorts of pressures on "cloud" I keep wondering if the idea of a personal data center will take hold. In that model you would still use your web accessed services but they would run on equipment at your house rather than elsewhere.
For some with massive NAS setups etc this may already hold true. The problem is connectivity. Unless you stick within the 100 meter radius of wifi, you have to deal with you ISP. And few home connections offer much outbound bandwidth. Never mind the issues of firewalls and NATs.
And speaking of minitels, i can't help think that the switch from circuit switched to packet switched was the big enabler of the resurgence of the "leased terminal".
Before you had to have a complete wire circuit from terminal to computer. But these days all that is needed is that the packets reach their destination. This in turn allows a single "terminal" to connect to multiple computers using a single physical circuit.
When you look at the architecture of the infrastructure for a Google or a Facebook you see what are essentially data center sized computers that you can walk through. We have a smart terminal called "web browser" that accesses them :-). And things like ChromeOS and Chromebooks take that to its logical conclusion. Oddly enough I got an early sense of this using a Heathkit H89 which was a terminal with an embedded CP/M computer. Where there was a CP/M program providing the user interface while talking over a slow serial link to a data server. Others got to experience things like the Minitel. Crude by today's standards but heading down the road we currently drive on :-).
The corporate challenges of having everything in the mainframe (competing with others for resources, paying a 'tax' to IT for running the mainframe even if you weren't using it, information accessibility that you did not control, Etc.) pulled PC's into business when people could do their jobs on them and didn't need to use the mainframe. Given similar sorts of pressures on "cloud" I keep wondering if the idea of a personal data center will take hold. In that model you would still use your web accessed services but they would run on equipment at your house rather than elsewhere.