You guys are just jumping guns. Dont worry about the jargons like cloud,SaaS,PaaS and rental desktops. Forget 1 year, its not even going to be there in the next 5 yrs.These things are not just going to make it in the near future. Even if they do there is enough room and enough scope of on-premise stuff to exist. For the cloud and the true SaaS companies to really make a difference, there should fundamentally be a change in the way infrastructure and technology is laid out today. Let me tell you when people will truly rent a desktop(from my experience of working for a cloud desktop renting company) – people will rent only do if
1- The network speeds are comparable to disk reads. Why would you otherwise divorce your desktop? with fast FC and gigabit switches, its slowly getting there but not the rate which people think.
2- When all the apps and services are truly multi-tenant. This is more a technology problem which we can think people will adopt if there is enough incentive.
3- When there is one true big microsoft like cloud company. i dont see there a single company who is truly embracing the cloud. Maybe Amazon to some extent. You need atleast one google or microsoft or Oracle in the making for the cloud.

Thanks,
Arun.

P.S. It might be confusing to someone else that there are two “Swaroop”s discussing here, LOL. Do you have a surname that we can add to differentiate?

My biggest worry about tech is the “licensing” model with the evolution of cloud computing. The notion these days is services pay and products are just a means to sell services and build dependency. My biggest worry is some M**shaft based in Rdmond , Wa might just tell you that your OS is service you need to pay year after year.

• I have been pondering about this for way too long , I think for a product to be successful and relevant when launched, it has to be evolutionary or acceptably revolutionary( case in point apple – newton ).