The cloud (aka "the 'net") is the machine

This past week, with my usual round of messages enticing me to visit the cheapest pharmacies online, seeking my assistance to transfer squillions of dollars (in unmarked USD 1.00 bills I hope), the hottest stockmarket tips, offers to give me a PhD because of my outstanding work experience, guaranteed results in increasing the size of certain parts of my anatomy and the usual slate of tech news and updates I got one announcing the beta release of Ajaxpresents. This lets one open, edit and save "Presentations" in Microsoft's .ppt format, and follows a bunch of other products which do similar for Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Visio/Illustrator/Freehand drawings and another thats plays music.

I guess this is the continued evolution of the Internet, where applications are now readily available to run from the 'net, and the cloud is the machine now (or at least getting there - and at a great rate of knots). Perhaps the future is low power handheld devices with a reasonable sized display which will be an embedded browser with WiFi (or its successor) connectivity, which will be all that is needed to do most computing tasks. With a web-based VoIP application (which are already here), this device is also your phone, heck lets call it a MCD - Multimedia Communications Device. Goes without saying that readily available bandwidth will be the key to success. With interest by cities around the world to install metropolitan wireless access (sometimes free) the infrastructure is getting there. Interesting times lie ahead.