9 out of 10 Computer Tasks Can Move to the Web?

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt seems to think he's on to something. Schmidt says he believes 90% of today's computer tasks can do just as well when housed on the World Wide Web. Of course that leaves the remaining 10%, which Schmidt notes is mainly comprised of high-end graphics processing (and perhaps climatological prediction or game theory number crunching?)

Will there come a time, in the not-too-distant future, in which we all store everything off of our hard drives, in "virtual" desktops that can be accessed anywhere? What does this pose to privacy concerns? Will companies find the same performance in a future iteration of Google Docs, for example, than they do with Microsoft Word? Of course, the growth in Google's free apps seems to point towards this -- currently 2,000 companies start using Google Apps every day, and Google Docs now has over 1.6 million U.S. users.

Google Code image by fimoculous [cc, 2.0]