Coincidentally (or maybe not so) in the past week, I’ve been in a few conversations about more and more apps coming to a browser near you enabled by Ajax – namely an alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. Paolo Massa is working on AjaxOffice and Writely is an alternative to Word already available in beta. Which begs the question – where is all of this data going to be stored? Flickr already stores my photos, but what about every other filetype? Perhaps it would be better if all of my own files were tagged and stored remotely, as Jesse Andrews suggests, “Web 2.0 needs Data 2.0! A del.icio.us for files.” Will the browser finally render my OS inconsequential and break the MS stronghold? I am not saying that these ideas/plans aren’t without concerns, but they are definitely thought-provoking.
UPDATE: It’s tough to continually monitor the blogosphere for everything relevant to a conversation. Case in point, last night I as I was catching up, I saw this post by Robert Scoble and the follow-up by Om Malik debating the role of thin clients. Also, read Richard MacManus’s thoughtful piece as well.