The network is the computer when our work only lives on the web

That famous title line was uttered by none other than former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, and it's being carried out further by current CEO Jonathan Schwartz (see his blog here). At the Office 2.0 conference this week in San Francisco, it appears that many believe the days of locally-installed Office productivity apps like Microsoft Office are coming to a close. McNealy was way ahead of his time in making that famous statement that went on to become Sun's corporate tagline, and for his part, much of that tagline is coming true these days with high-speed Internet connections everywhere.

Indeed, Microsoft is pushing hard to integrate its Office suite into "Office Live", which at some point int he future needs to probably replace that bulky retail box that comes with Microsoft Office when you buy it. So, does Microsoft see Office apps living entirely on the web as well? In some form, I think it does.

There will, however, always be a need to have a locally-installed Office productivity suite installed on millions of computers, unless Internet access is ubiquitous as the air we all breathe. I'm not sure about you, but there are times when, gasp, I actually do not have Internet access, but still need to get work done. There's a major scratch.

Are we close to "Web 2.0" of everything you use on a daily basis being "webified"? That will eventually happen, but as I stated above, you can't just port every single thing to a web browser and expect the globe to start using just a web browser for everything, no matter how heavily Google Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) thinks this is going to happen. While many millions of customers will be easily wanting to just use a web browser to get most of their work done, that backup option will always need to be there for the future, I see.