The company said it was also pushing toward the widely anticipated post-PC era of mobile Internet computing.

Mathematicians and cryptographers were the first to see the possibilities of Internet computing.

Internet computing has also cast old software issues in a new light.

The most rapid innovation and most venture-capital investment in recent years, experts note, have been in Internet computing, outside Microsoft's stronghold in the personal computer business.

But in recent years, SAP has moved to adopt the open standards of Internet computing.

Another issue is that the vehicle for bringing Internet computing to poorer nations may not be the computer at all, but the cellphone.

Regardless of the impact on Microsoft, Sun benefits from anything that stimulates Internet computing.

On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing.

The rise of Internet computing is behind the rapid growth of data centers and the increase in energy use.

In Chicago, Michael Rushmore, a banker, said Internet computing has "fundamentally changed the way we do business" over the last three or four years.