I wondered if Apple might make a play for that market. They have relatively little skin in the game in terms of online services. They have credibility in both

I wondered if Apple might make a play for that market. They have relatively little skin in the game in terms of online services. They have credibility in both mobile and laptop markets. They have at least some expertise in related areas like server, workstation and networking products. Perhaps more significantly, historically much of their success has come from making big plays that created new markets, and their current golden goose is looking a bit tired. I could have imagined them offering an antidote to cloud-everything for businesses, particularly smaller ones that have more flexibility and less lock-in with their current brands, that wanted good centralised management of both static and mobile devices under in-house control. I could also have imagined them offering some sort of home networking hub where everything from your Macbook to your iPhones and iPads to your TV and media streaming could talk to a centralised box that offered media storage, a controlled way to use online services for things like backups and media streaming, and even some sort of remote/VPN access so you could connect into all your normal facilities over a mobile network while out and about. Given the pressure they're increasingly coming under with their traditional strategy of trying to promote expensive, high-end mobile devices and a closed ecosystem, I wondered if they might see an opportunity and commit some serious resources to making a play for that hybrid/combined/in-house market. Apparently not. I also wondered whether there might be some sort of grand coalition among the big Linux players, which probably means Red Hat, Canonical and possibly Valve. There's probably enough money and enough potential upside there to fund the creation of rival "killer app" level software for Linux desktops. And again, then you have both client and server side expertise and some experience building custom hardware as well, which opens up a world of possibilities if you can generate a critical mass of interest. Then you have the likes of IBM, who have been riding the waves of changing infrastructure and local/remote pendulum swings for many years, and certainly have the resources to build a viable new platform if they wanted to. It's not as if they're strangers to either corporate strategy with enterprise customers or building a solid desktop platform, after all. And finally, there's always the chance of a dark horse. There are a lot of people out there who used to work for big name companies that are no longer with us and who have developed solid products that ultimately didn't make it for mostly non-technical reasons, and there is a lot of VC money around. I didn't think it was inconceivable that someone would put together a credible executive team and raise a lot of early funding with a prize this big at stake.