In All Software Should Be Network Aware, Tim O’Reilly presents a nice list of potential innovations in software design to take advantage of the increasing number of networked devices. And as some of the comment authors note, once you start thinking this way, you also begin to think of facilitating interaction between applications on the same machine, regardless of the network.

As has been noted, Apple is making some great steps in this direction, with Rendezvous, for example, and with treating the Address Book as a system-wide resource. This is where the action is going to be, although it’s going to take some time because it’s going to require some deep rethinking in a lot of areas.