Malware

out by appliances. People like ourselves will probably stick with our own stuff, may all end up on linux.
Businesses though a different story. Here you are talking about giving business critical data and functionality to a third party. It will all depend on how dependant your business is on it.
Store all your data with company X, then they ring you up and say we forgot to back it up, or we appear to have left a backup in public and it's gone missing. encryption ?
Or the absolute classic, a slight error in the code and someone else can view and change your data.
From a technology point of view we've been capable of this for years, hasn't took off yet though.

Marketing people will try to sell it to the general public as a cost saver and data saver. Most home users don't back up so online stuff has it's benefits. In the same token consumers aren't a gullible as some marketing people think. All it will take is some consumer having all their documents inadvertently go public and the press will have a field day. Mass exodus. Big Brother is in everyone's mind even if its not vocally said.

I still see components in the home. A TV here, a DVD player there, computer for the web over there. Like all-in-one printers, it's a great idea but often doesn't work the way it should.

Just shelled out more than the cost of your PC for some office software so little jimmy can do his school project, or you rent time on a per document basis off a server.
At that point it simply becomes how many documents do you produce. vs the cost of the application software and upgrades.

Similar for a small business, they'll do more documents but that have the cost of maintaining an infra-structure.
If you already need that infrastructure though for business specific applications, then you might as well provide the facility in house, which of course has some other outstanding benefits.
I suppose Acme corp could rent computing power, but I can't see that being cost effective, even a bean counter would jib at that after a risk assessment.

The price of the service would be pitched at what the average punter is prepared to pay each month. When you work out the average annual cost of running a PC with it's software it is actually quite a surprisingly high figure.

Provided that a Service Provider sets a "golden spot" monthly pricing many of the average punters will leap at the chance of avoiding the continual niggle of having maintain a PC, even if that cost is a few dollars more per month than running your own PC.

The monthly pricing will have little to do with the actual cost. Large corporations will be prepared to invest massively to capture this enormous market.

and for certain niches one that will benefit the customer.

Me personally I'd pay nothing.

I use Open Office.

The firm I work for would do it just after the company cat skated through ****.

A decison to go down this route is no different to outsourcing your infrastructure, in fact that's what it is. Backing out of it is going to cost big style, once you are entirely dependant on the third party to run your business, that's going to cost too.

Never pay some one to hold on to your nuts, you are always going to want them back at some point.

It pretty common to get a free handset when you take out a mobile phone contract with a monthly charge. Some of these handsets are worth 100's of pounds (even more dollars!).

These PU's could have similar manufacturing costs to the phones so could be provided 'free' with your software subscription.

Would the average Joe go out and buy a PC when they can get pretty much the same functionality at minimal cost?

The problem with this idea is: What happens to your personal data if you can't afford to pay the subscription costs to your storage host?

Here's a scenario: You pay $25/month for an online service, probably from Google, Yahoo or Windows Live, that allows you to store your spreadsheets, financial documents, e-mails, photos, etc., online.

You lose your job, your credit cards all max out/cancel, and you can no longer afford your $25/month. Your subscription lapses. Six months later, you need to declare bankruptcy, but relevant information is stored online where you can no longer access it because your subscription has lapsed.

Will you be able to sue the company you got the service from to turn the subscription back on? Will you be able to afford such a lawsuit?

Remember, you don't have an actual computer, and the data is probably stored in a semi/fully proprietary format, so you can't just download it and open it locally.

This, of course, isn't any worse than having a hard drive crash and losing data that was never backed up, but backing up your data is something that anyone can choose to do, while the subscription service thing doesn't give you such a choice in case of subscription lapse.

I hadnt even thought of a subscription lapse.