Comment remote desktop, many uses (Score 1) 118
The basic technology OnLive has is remote desktop. Mainly they do this for games. Their games client runs on an array of platforms (PC, Mac, Android phones and tablets), and could probably be ported to many more without much difficulty.
As far as I can tell, the client is a souped-up rdesktop. They've paid close attention to doing the right video and audio compression and other things to minimize bandwidth and latency. The remote system behaves like local (convincingly so in most cases I've seen). (Decide for yourself, there's a free trial.)
So at this time you can play a variety of PC games on your client, and that client can be running on your PC or your Mac or your mobile device, eventually your iPad, possibly your iPhone.
But really, as noted, it's just a remote desktop. So they can run on Office suite and let you access it from any device. Right now it looks like their client needs to be tailored to do it, so they don't have the Office stuff working in their regular client but in one specifically for the "Onlive Desktop" feature. I bet eventually they merge it into a single client. You'll be able to play games or do Office from your array of devices.
And I expect that eventually they'll throw other systems into the backend instead of just the PCs they seem to have. So then you'll be able to play OS X games from your array of devices. Or your, uh, Linux games from your Windows tablet.
A well-working remote desktop makes a decoupling layer between OS you're on and applications (or OS) you want to run. Commoditizing the platform has historically been met with hostility, especially by Redmond (thanks for holding back web tech, you fuckers), so I'm wondering where this will lead.
