The idea of making a web browser that is also a web server makes a lot more sense than the current trend of cloud computing. The privately owned data center concept is unsustainable, and defeats the concept the internet, which is distributed data.
Eben Moglen, I believe, made some great points about the huge increase in distributed computing power (ie, the power of the laptops in the audience) in this talk:
Data centers get a lot of press, and it is warranted, but regular old desktops and laptops (and smartphones, etc!) are incredibly powerful and underutilized. The internet doesn't have to be cable tv, it can be the telephone game with checksums.
The privately owned data center concept is unsustainable
It's not clear what you're saying here, but I think I strongly disagree. Data centers have real economies of scale (both in dollars and in availability) which shouldn't be ignored. Web 2.0 "freeconomics" may be unsustainable, but you don't have to use that business model; you can make data centers (or "the cloud") work for you.
...and defeats the concept the internet, which is distributed data.
IMO the concept of the Internet is to move packets, and servers are equally legitimate as PCs.
Distribution means not a single point of failure. So both cloud computing and maybe Opera Unite are advances on that.
But saying cloud computing is not the direction I believe it wrong. The idea of cloud computing is really adding more distribution to your network. So you can have cheaper servers all over rather than just your servers at one data center with a remote data store that never has been checked.
Opera Unite is really just the IRC and a slice of P2P. But there will be huge reliability problems as with any distributed P2P system.
