Hm. I'm going to say no: this is not the future of all software. It seems as if there's got to be some software that is going to stay tied to servers and specific machines, because even stuff that lives online needs to be stored somewhere.
Is this the future of a lot of software products? Very likely. The convenience of being able to sign into a website and work on a document online, from wherever you happen to be, rather than having to transfer items back and forth, is a very big deal.
I tend not to create the final versions of documents online. I use Google Docs, in large part because once you have one Google account it's soooo easy to add more and not have to remember new passwords for new sites, and I'm not sure how well the other products we read about do the same things, but Docs, at least, tends to have odd formatting issues and look a little unfinished.
I wouldn't turn in an assignment from Google Docs. I do, however, start documents there, work on them from various computers, fiddle with the text, and get the main thing into shape, before saving it as an MS Office version for final editing and polishing.
I used to email myself versions of documents to work on, and that's OK, it gets the job done, but I'd wind up with lots of different 'editions' of a single document, and the folder would get cluttered. Also, if I forget to email it, I can be left unable to work on it until I get back to the originating computer. In these busy days, where any time you have to work on something is precious, you don't want to be unable to make that nifty little addition to a paper that you just thought of, because you can't access your document.
Flash drives are another option for this, and don't get me wrong, I love me my flash drive, but you still have to remember to move the item from one drive to the next, and the multiple copy issue is still there.
A different and equally major benefit offered by these online office programs is the option to have multiple people working on the same document without having to have multiple copies floating around, waiting for someone to integrate all the changes. Online documents can be really useful for collaborative products, and I've successfully used them for slide presentations and word documents. Again, the finished version of the product wasn't presented in Google Doc format, but we were able to get a lot of the initial work done that way.
I don't think the online office is totally ready to be a stand-alone feature yet, but it offers another useful tool that, when applied to a problem, can make things go a lot more smoothly.
And in answer to the question, I expect a lot of software products will at some point be available online rather than needing to be installed to a specific machine. But not all.
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