While those of us in the IT industry have been oohing and aahing (or, alternately, scoffing and spitting) at the pedestrian achievements of giants such as Amazon and Google in bringing us services and applications that live online and are delivered exclusively through our browsers, the computer gaming industry has been incubating marvels such as Onlive. Onlive, still in beta testing, bills itself as "The Future of Video Games" and if their services perform as promised, they might well be right.

Onlive will deliver on-demand gaming via browser plug-ins (or a small, dedicated appliance which can be plugged in to your TV) by running the game at their data center and streaming the gameplay down to you in real time... or as they say "ultra high-performance" and "blindingly fast speeds."

There has been a lot of scoffing at this premise, so entrenched has been the view that cutting-edge, resource intensive applications such as modern PC games can only be run on powerful, on-site platforms at any acceptable level of performance. And this may be so; we'll have to see if Onlive can deliver on their promises. But the argument has not been exclusive to gaming... many resource intensive business applications have also been assumed to be immune from recent trends toward SaaSification. I've accepted that premise as readily as anyone, but listening to TWiT recently, I heard Leo LaPorte say something that jarred me out of it. "If you can do it with games," he said, "you can do it with anything, can't you?"

I suspect he is correct. And if it turns out they can do it with games, what does that imply for business desktop applications, none of which hold a candle in terms of resource consumption to modern games? It is possible that this technology will come into online casino gaming in the future as well.