Background
In the early 90's I was working in information technology at HP and was prototyping the early OMG standards in Smalltalk. The prototype included a set of distributed desktop applications that made sharing and collaborating on a network really natural. At the same time there was a guy in the news riding his 1000-lb, internet-enabled bicycle across the US. "Who else would ever want to do that?", I wondered, "But substitute a sailboat sailing around the US and I bet there would be a line of volunteers."
So I hatched up a proposal to Dave Packard that HP should fund such an activity as PR for our nascent distributed desktops. "HP doesn't do PR", was his terse reply but he softened it by offering my team a day trip to the research lab and vessel at MBARI in Monterey. There, a broadband internet link between the ship and the scientists ashore literally allowed them to drive the submersibles from their offices.
That level of satellite technology is now reasonably priced for the recreational boater. The Open Source Software movement has demonstrated that collocation is not essential for quality software development. Using technologies like Hadoop and Mahout, the real computing muscle lives far away from its users in a data center and is accessed remotely anyway. Now seems like a good time to move the client really far out of his traditional venues. Don't like sailing but have a cabin in Montana? Same message.
