Everyone will eventually have their own operating system running in the cloud.
If you look at computers over the years, computing power has moved like a pendulum from a centralized infrastructure to a distributed one, then back again. This is usually based on the cost of computing power, cost and accessibility.
Internet access has been the same way. Before Internet Service Providers there was AOL. Eventually this centralized infrastructure for content was replaced by billions of web pages and millions of web servers. Now content has shifted back to centralized social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
I propose that the majority of what we do with our personal computers will soon move to the cloud, just like enterprise systems are today. Everyone will have their own server running in the cloud, storing their data, their email and their social graph.
How will this happen? A company will create a layer on top of cloud computing platforms like Azure or Amazon’s EC2 that supports a one click installation of a personal OS in the cloud. This will happen when cloud computing becomes affordable enough that a mainstream customer (or an early adopter) finds value in having an always available, always running operating system with very little (if no) maintenance.
What this means for us is that we will have the ability to have our own decentralized, customized Facebook, Twitter, and data storage. We will want this because we want control of our data, our social network and our online persona. By owning our own OS in the cloud we can decide how information is presented to us, what features we want, and how we want to share our own information.
If there was a Facebook or Twitter killer, this would be it.
(I know what some of you may be thinking. ChromeOS is an OS for the cloud today. But it is restrictive since it only creates a platform for Google’s cloud solutions.)