A public infrastructure of servers.

Somewhere during the development process of Chandler, Kapor rethinks the peer-to-peer foundations:

Kapor was rethinking the merits of peer-to-peer anyway. At a June meeting where he formally announced the adoption of a server-based sharing design to his staff, he explained, "I've had a significant change of point of view. There was a kind of frontier idealism that was well intentioned but not practical on my part. The issue is about empowering people. It's not about the infrastructure. Maybe we need a robust public infrastructure of servers to let people do what they want to do. My and OSAF's original position was, electricity is good, therefore everyone should have their own power plant! Unconsciously, I always imagined that user empowerment somehow meant a server-free or server-light environment. Now I think that's actually wrong."

(Rosenberg: p. 214)

Could that "public infrastructure of servers" be what Google and others have been building in the past few years? The time when individuals can have their files "on the cloud" is here already. Millions of people have their music, pictures and opinions hosted on sites such as Google Documents, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, Picassa, Shutterfly, Flickr, YouTube and many others. Right now they access all this information via snappy web applications written in AJAX but there is nothing stopping us from adding these services to regular, old-style rich apps. Actually, the folks at the Mozilla Labs are already working on some Firefox extensions to do exactly that. In this respect, it could very well be that the project to build Chandler started too early for its own sake.