I think its unrealistic to build a general web-based solution Maybe not a perfectly "general" solution, but there are lots of domains where data is analyzed th

I think its unrealistic to build a general web-based solution Maybe not a perfectly "general" solution, but there are lots of domains where data is analyzed that would benefit from a powerful web-based analytic environment. these datasets are usually huge Not all interesting datasets are huge. Some large data sets can easily be shared among users -- Amazon already hosts a lot of common data sets in EC2 already, for example. Given the steadily-decreasing cost of bandwidth and the fact that you don't need interactive response (at least for the initial data load), I don't think it's that impractical for a pretty wide set of scenarios.