Corporate World excited about desktops in the cloud
The folks at "Talking Cloud" (who are coming at the subject from an obvious bias) point out that corporations are looking more and more at a corporate desktop environment where desktops are in the Cloud.
With more and more users needing access to traditional Windows applications inside the corporate firewall, the rise of Desktop-as-a-Service may be the future for your average worker bee.
With more and more users needing access to traditional Windows applications inside the corporate firewall, the rise of Desktop-as-a-Service may be the future for your average worker bee.
As long as we are constrained by the speed of light, latency can be an issue, connectivity is also a problem so people are going to want a computer+data with them.
Until brain-computer interfaces become much better I think there'll be a market for PCs (whether laptops or desktops) - since they can be a lot more powerful and capable. Smartphones on the other hand might lose significant share to wearables once the latter start augmenting people in many ways a phone can't. Telekinesis/telepathy/eidetic memory/video-audio recognition would be more seamless with a wearable than a phone- it's the difference between someone seemingly doing autistic savant/magical stuff and someone using a phone to do them.
But central servers still aren't going to go away either - search, etc. Maybe the Tor chat thing will start mass adoption of "P2P" messaging and other stuff. Given the slow adoption of IPv6 I doubt Tor will scale to billions of users and remain "decentralized"- the NSA may run the mega/giganodes ;).