Oh come on. What about Sun "The network is the computer" Microsystems? What about Java, originally designed for a settop box, as described, way before 1995? Although I tend to credit Sun with the idea, the concept was in the air. There's even a book (fiction) about it, "The first 20 million is the hardest".

I guess Sun can't buy ad space in Wired anymore... Oracle can.

BTW one page: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_oracle/all/1

“What the world really wants,” Ellison told the crowd, “is to plug into a wall to get electronic power, and plug in to get data.”

With all the cheap netbooks and handhelds today, this is the end-point I see the world saturating to.

Well, apart from developers - who need good full-feature machines with apps and toolkits - the others would only need access to the internet. I see it something like "turn on the computer" vs "turn on the net".

Bulding an OS around a web browser, Chrome OS, I think is a step towards this goal.

[EDIT: Oh ya. Chrome OS has a mention at the end of the article]

”Mr. Larry is near Australia in his sailboat and can’t be reached,”

I believe that whatever hotshot CEO you are, you must always be accessible by your employee and be ready to discuss their problems (atleast if not your customer if you have a CS team).

Productivity tools and games that are run as applets written using protocols like Ajax and Ruby on Rails. No downloads required.

The "no downloads required" part is true. The rest... not so much.