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Lili Cheng of Microsoft, who formerly ran the Social Computing Group there; Tom Ngo, CEO of NextPage; Chris Thomas, chief strategy officer at Intel; Gary Bennitt of Goowy; and Kevin Lynch of Adobe spoke about the future of the desktop at the Supernova conference during a lunchtime roundtable. Much of their discussion revolved around whether data would be centrally stored in future, or stored locally in a number of locations. Interesting privacy and identity issues came up (they start about halfway down this post), and panelists’ remarks also shed some long-term light on how the 3pointD world might become more mobile and distributed, and just how long that might take.

Sharing of information between applications, data storage sites and people was more or less the focus of the conversation. “We live in an inherently decentralized world. said Tom Ngo. Today’s infrastructure simply is not set up for that.”

“I started in the future, in research, and now I’m back in the present,” Cheng complained, recalling observations from her social computing days at Microsoft. “When you start sharing your information, the experience expands in this beautiful way. It almost becomes addictive to see who’s talking about what, what’s new, seeing personal information from some friends. We really need to look at sharing and synching and connecting to other people, making that part of your life on your computer do such a better job than today.”

“The thing that needs to change is what happens to the data,” Bennitt said. “The operating system itself, nothing is inherently wrong with it, but there are abstractions or layers that sit on top of that. The operating system doesn’t itself provide data acdcessibility. Data being acesible everywhere is the big change that needs to tak eplace to see an evoution. It’s not about synchronizing, it’s about making thoes devices access that data in same lcoation. If you are in a conected state, there’s a big kick that you get when you move into accessing the same data everywhere.”

Audience members also raised the point that words like “desktop” or even “mobile phone” are increasingly losing their meaning as such devices and applications become broader and broader in power. A cellular phone that plays music and browses the Web may be subject to three different regulatory regimes.

Adobe’s Lynch suggested that “we’re using our old terms to try to solve next problem, which is sharing freely something that is already being shared freely.” Lynch gave the example of handing over a physical photo to a friend and then having it passed around. “What we have at our disposal is opportunities to do things differently. We can tag content now, so why not tag it with the rights of use.”

“Some of this we’re just going to have to discover through use,” Cheng pointed out.

Intel’s Thomas talked about “a whole new generation of solutions coming out, whether we want to call them Web 2.0, they’re really being assembled and mashed up from multiple components, multiple vendors. The other side of that is, how does the desktop, the phone, the laptop actually help in this environment. What we’ve been learning in designing mobilized software, we’re starting to create more reliable code, but also create interfaces where your software scripts and other things can call the platform to know if there’s a network and what its capabilities are. The future is going to be one of extreme interconnection, it’s going to be dependent on where are we, what are we, what are we connecting to and how do we render that.”

Ngo saw data centralization being a slow process. “Accessing the same data in the same place won’t happen for many, many years to come. The trend has been, as end-user devices get more and more powerful and applications place more and more demands on the physical infrastructre, you have more things happening locally to the users. End users need direct control of the data. It causes people to horde their information. It’s going to take Star-Trek-style subspace radio and beyond for us to get to truly centralized architecture. We as a company have made a very deep bet on a future where you fundamentally have information scattered around multiple places and you need a way to cope with that.”

Refreshingly, panelists agreed on the importance of identity in determining the future of such issues. “All these conversations we have about the technology infrastracture actually pale in comparison to identity,” Ngo continued. “I’m actually several Tom Ngo’s, I don’t know if you knew that. It’s privacy concerns like that that drive people to store data in different places.”

Lili Change of Micrsoft took the user’s perspective. “As you think about centralizing services, you really need to think about the identity of the user. I don’t know if the end user is going to want all these systems talking to each other just because of privacy issues. It’ll be really interesting, there are different places and ways to aggregate the information in a way that makes sense to the end user. We really need to be careful when we think about centralizing versus decentralizing, and the impact on the user and do they really want their work, home, hobbies all integrated together. People are much more aware of privacy issues than they were in the past.”

Adobe’s Lynch said, “There’s a balance between whether people want to have information centrally stored, or stored locally.” What needs to be bridged is for applications to be able to access data both locally and from some centralized location. Intel’s Thomas talked about desktops and operating systems being developed that can switch between personal, enterprise, or anonymous identities on the fly. “The future is very bright in that environment,” he said, “but it isn’t a standalone environment. It’s about figuring out how to shield myself when I don’t want to be seen and still work in that environment at same time.”

“I’m not convinced people are going to want only one identity,” said Cheng. Interactions with a doctor’s ofice, a dating service, a school, and MySpace, for instance, may all be conducted under different identities. “I’d be hesitant to say everyone wants all their stuff in one place and they want one identity because it’s easier to log in.”

Most panelists agreed there was some sort of desktop revolution on the way. Adobe’s Lynch said, “When desktop computers first came out they revolutionized the desktop experience at the time. Initially they were pretty low power, but they revolutionized how people interacted with those applications. We’re at a similar point in time right now where the Web has enabled people to interact with a whole new class of applications. Of course we’re in a different space and have a lot more limitations, but the potential can be as dramatic as the change we saw before. It’s interesting to look at how we can enable these Web applications to perform as first-class citizens on your computer.”

“There’s not one desktop , there’s many,” said Intel’s Thomas. “I don’t think we’re going to have one desktop, but I think we’re going to start breaking apart the things we thought the desktop did. We’re not going to go back to one desktop, but we’re going to use the desktop [components] for their value. We’re going to see very dynamnic modesl of wha is your desktop and where does it happen based on who wants to pay for it.” (I.e., pay for the power to run it.)