Can you Host Windows Apps Online? [closed]

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Can you host demos of open source apps online, similar to how http://php.opensourcecms.com/ does for CMSs? For example, could you host a demo of Open Office for people to try out online? Maybe by connecting to a server that has Windows 7 installed or some Windows 7 simulator. How would you do that if you could?

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It would certainly be possible, using something like a combination of remote desktop and virtual servers, however I haven't seen any solution like that.

The main reason for that is of course that it would require a lot of hardware. While a web server can handle thousands of concurrent users, a server running virtual remote sessions would be able to handle something in the range of 10-20 concurrent users.

Being somewhere around 100 times more expensive than running web servers, one can easily see why there is little demand for such technology.

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There are various ways in which the visual display and mouse interaction of a Windows app can appear on a user's machine while actually running remotely. Refer to—for instance—the RFB protocol which is used by VNC.

It even appears there are some efforts to embed such remote screens into browsers using Flash. I haven't tried it:

http://flashlight-vnc.sourceforge.net/

As @Guffa points out, this really won't scale very well. But at smaller scales it's important to be aware of: I'm a big advocate of using approaches like this when someone has a niche legacy intranet application written in something like Visual Basic that only a few people use. (Why rewrite something that already works in Ruby-on-Rails or whatever if only 10 people in the world will ever use it?)

At a meta-level, I think dropping users into an app they don't know how to use isn't always the best way of selling it. With pervasive Internet video I think there's a big potential for screencasts to explain and introduce software, or teach them features:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast

It shows people what's possible, is easy for them to pass around, and is a lot less of a development/administrative/security effort on your part.