The Future is Soft[ware].

If you’ve heard of Google Chrome, you know the premise behind Google’s latest inception: software-less computing. It’s a phenomenon that has already begun to take place in the form of replacing hard copies of movies and music with download-only models, and even gaming systems have jumped on board. Convenience and control are the names of the game, the latter being how content creators are ever-increasingly able to control how you use your content – with an emphasis on your – content you’ve purchased.

It’s only been about ten years since music downloads hit the digital scene, just a few years after “the internet” came around. It changed everything. Young people were illegally swapping music on the now-defunct Napster p2p (peer-to-peer) network, CD sales slumped and, years later, the RIAA brought the smackdown on music being traded without fair artist compensation – even if the artists had nothing to do with the RIAA’s lawsuits. This crucial time in our digital history, however, marked the dawning of a new era – an era without physical media. The iPod, which was introduced in 2001, brought the idea of digital music libraries mainstream, followed by the iTunes Music Store, which partnered with many of the world’s largest music labels, ushering in a new way to buy, and use, music.

It wasn’t long until film joined the revolution – iTunes, Streaming Netflix and even services like Hulu (which offer streaming TV shows on-demand, in very high quality) have offered alternatives to buying or renting physical media (like DVDs and Blu Ray discs), and are ever-growing in popularity. It’s even been hypothesized that software giant Microsoft supported Toshiba’s underdog HD-DVD format in the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray format war a couple years ago to simply prevent either format from gaining serious momentum – with the objective of furthering a future containing download-only media. Even gaming systems are moving away from physical media, like Sony’s PSP Go, the company’s latest handheld gaming system which features a proprietary download-only platform with no game cartridges / discs.

As music and movie formats slowly move away from physical media – and will undoubtedly be wholly replaced to download-only form in the very near future – the same is happening with computer software. Bringing Google back into the story, all of the software the web giant has released as of late – Google Docs (a web alternative to Microsoft’s Office productivity suite), Gmail (a hugely popular and free webmail service), Google Voice (a beta program which gives users a free phone number, allowing callers to have their voicemails transcribed into email form, among other features) and others are all offered purely online. These “web applications” are actually software, which run on Google’s servers (referred to as a “cloud”), but the end user never installs anything, simply accessing a website to run, use and store information within the application.

As with music and movie formats, tech experts are predicting that all software will be web-only in the future. This is the premise behind Google’s new Chrome operating system, which is slated to be released on proprietary hardware (like netbooks) in late 2010. The idea is that the user has no software actually installed on the computer, except for the open-source, low-resource-consuming Chrome OS. All functions performed on the computer will be accessed through an internet connection, and all software and data will be stored and managed remotely by Google. This, in my opinion, will inevitably happen, but I have a few doubts.

First of all, the rudimentary foundation of a web-only computing platform depends on an ever-present internet connection which, at present, isn’t all together possible with the current state of our global network infrastructure. WiFi, though ubiquitous in some major metropolitan areas, isn’t quite prevalent enough to dependably support a netbook computer everywhere a user might want to use his or her machine. Cellular data connections like 3G networks are fairly widespread, but are expensive and out of reach to many. I’m sure this limitation will subside as time moves forward and cellular connections get faster, cheaper and more widespread.

Another concern of mine with web-only computing is how data will be stored and controlled, and what privacy concerns can be raised from such a system. Say you have all of your data on a “cloud” server being wholly managed by Google – your college photo albums for example. If you later decide to run for public office, or even apply for a job, whose to say that photo of you hitting a two-foot bong or downing shots of Jägermeister is totally secure on some random hard drive in who-knows-where? Who would have access to that data, and how would its security be assured? Think big brother, but scarier. These are just a couple of my concerns with mobile-only computing platforms, but honestly, this future is inevitable. Will moving away from locally-stored data make life easier and more convenient? Absolutely. Will not having to install your own software on your own machine make computing more reliable and less crash-prone? Probably. Will this new digital frontier serve the best interests of the users, both in regards to privacy and cost? We’ll have to wait and see.