I’m not sure how far we are from that. I think that the situation is not necessarily as you see it, in the sense that, for example, an Android phone is an incredibly powerful computing device which, when you buy it, is yours. Anything, any software that you run on this device that executes locally is your software running on your data.
The fact that the last 10 years have seen a flowering of web technologies that involve services I think is...Many of these services do amazing things that we didn’t have before. I’m a very frequent user of Google Docs, for example. I find it amazing that I’m able to collaborate with somebody with a Google Doc across the world, and we can each see what we’re typing on this doc as we go.
This is a capability that either requires some kind of instantaneous peer-to-peer transport of the data between those devices or that they be stored on the server somewhere. Obviously, the things that come from it being stored on a server somewhere are very, very powerful. But that doesn’t mean that this is the only paradigm that gets to exist.
We already have vast amounts of computing power in our purses and in our pockets. A lot of the software does run in our purses and our pockets. I think this is frankly a learned helplessness more than it is a fact.