ergophobe - 9:18 pm on Nov 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

Of course, the crowd here isn't typical. Did any of you see the video where Google went out and surveyed people and found less than half knew what a browser was? When asked what browser they used, most people answered "Google" except those that said "Yahoo".

My neighbor does three things with his computer
- play flight simulator
- access the internet.
- spend hours and hours on the weekends trying to the the #*$!ing thing working

I bet if people like that could just get rid of the whole hassle of being their own sysadmin, lots would.

To some extent, the PC as we know could and should in the near future become a geek's power tool, as it was not so long ago.

For people like us (I'm assuming anyone here is at least more like me than like the people who say their preferred browser is Google), I've never understood wanting to have apps in the cloud because of
- latency
- file format issues
- document control
- persistence

For example, I have no idea how to obtain a local copy of a Google doc (short of a "save as" export) and I have no idea what the native file format is and even if I did, if the Google Docs service ceases to exist tomorrow, there is no offline app I can buy that will read those docs and I wouldn't have copies anyway.

When I own a local copy of an app, as long as I own a computer that can still run that app, I have access to the documents I created with it (unless they're on a 9-inch floppy!).

>>are we getting so lazy that we can't trust ourself to install a program?

Back to my initial observation, the whole idea that the user should be responsible for installing and maintaining apps is just one model and one that really only dates from the late 1980s as the more general, common rule.

I don't know how old you all are, but at least IncrediBILL and I held tech jobs before PCs existed and there was one computer for a company or a university and everyone was on the same computer. And actually, if you were at a non-tech company, like my brother who was at a top-400 contruction firm, you bought computer time and your computer was, effectively, in the "cloud" though it was a smaller, local cloud with just one central node.

The point being that this world in which users install and maintain their own OS and apps is really only about 25 years old and I see no reason to believe that 25 years from now that model will still hold.

Currently, the liabilities still outweigh the advantages. But I don't actually miss the days when a sysdamin took care of application installation, updates, security patches, backups, archiving and so on.

In the long run, though, I expect data storage to become more like money storage. How many of you feel it's safer to keep all your money "locally" under the bed in your home?

Still, with storage and processing prices continuing to fall, I see local storage and processing, with online data backup, as the dominant model for the forseeable future.