What’s the best way to give poor people, particularly those in the Third World, access to the power of modern computing and communications? Some argue for developing and distributing dirt-cheap personal computers. But there may be a better way: giving people a personal “virtual desktop” that they can tap into through shared PCs.

It’s a similar model to the one that’s allowed telephone service to reach even the poorest and most remote populations. You can’t sell everyone a phone – most people in these places can’t afford one. Rather you bring one or two mobile phones into a village and rent them out call by call. Similarly, with existing utility-computing technologies, you can allow individuals to maintain their files and applications in a distant data center and tap into it through a shared PC or thin-client machine. Individuals can rent time on the shared PC for a little bit of money – and their data and apps will always be there, just as they left them.

An innovative little company named SimDesk has been pursuing this model, on a limited scale, for a while now. It provides users with storage space, computing power and a set of free applications that can be accessed over the Internet. One U.S. city, Houston, and one state, Indiana, already offer the service to their citizens. (Chicago is in the process of rolling it out.) If you live in these places, you can do sophisticated computing without having to spend hundreds of dollars to buy a PC, a bunch of programs and Internet access. You just go into a public library, sit at a terminal and log into what is, in effect, your own computer.

The utility model brought cheap electricity to the masses. Maybe it can do the same for computing.