Worthwhile article from the Times on the tension between online computing and the desktop model.

Clearly the graphics industry will lag behind a little in moving everything online, mostly for bandwidth reasons - but that move is afoot as well.

Quote:

The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices — a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its desktop PC software. Therein lies the conflict.

Link