Future trends in computing suggest that local windowed applications may become more important. The bandwidth required for current and future interactive services such as audio, video, and three-dimensional graphics are difficult to meet without specialized protocols or workstation support. When an application requires the manipulation of huge quantities of video, audio, and graphical data at interactive and constant rates, distributing the application at the semantic level of window system operations may not be workable.
Future trends in the use of video, audio, image processing and three-dimensional graphics imply that the graphical and interactive components of applications using these capabilities will execute on the local desktop computer. Already most workstations and PCs have some capacity to handle high-bandwidth services; future machines will be even more capable. All these capabilities for video, audio, image processing, and 3D will still need to be networked, but specialized network protocols can be developed to meet the demands of these services.
If the local desktop computer is the most efficient location for the entire window system component of future applications, then a new window system must optimize the case of local window system applications. The effective division between client and server for future applications is less likely to be at the level of window system operations.