Hi, my name is Terry Smith and I'm a developer and aspiring entrepreneur.

Hello all!  Here’s the next idea I came up with a few days back while brainstorming for new ideas with a couple friends:

One of the biggest problems people have is that applications on their computers may not be the same.  A laptop may have Office 2007, a desktop Office 2003 and the computers at school Office XP… you can see where I’m going with this.  To combat this, Google, Microsoft ad others are moving their applications into the cloud and making them accessible through the web browser.  But this transition phase is long and development heavy so I think we need an interim solution.

Someone should create a client that allows users to install software on their computer and simultaneously uploads the software and the necessary info to the cloud (registry settings, etc.).  Then at every computer a user logs in to that has this framework or software installed, has their software available to them.  Users no longer have to worry about having Office 2003 on one computer and Office 2007 on another.

As for implementation, you’d probably need to have a working knowledge of installers to get all of the necessary information out.  Users could even initally take a pre-install snapshot of their settings and then a post-install snapshot in the alpha and beta versions.  I would also host the data itself on Amazon’s S3 or a similar large scale data service, since some of these programs will be pretty big.  But the great thing is you only need to store one copy of most files for each program then just store the changed files or settings for every user who installs it after that.

The revenue model for this is simple; I would make this a paid service.  You could also potentially do a freemium model and allow a certain amount of space or a certain number of apps and then charge for an upgrade.

There are a number of services out there which have similar goals in mind, but nothing I know of that’s the same.

Comments are always welcome! Thanks for reading.