On my opinion the cloud will fail because it misses badly money, property
and copyright issues. The talks about the “utility computing” as power
grid are sweet, but the Internet is different.

It isn’t that neutral as power grid. Nobody talks about limiting
electricity one could use for fans or condition (like some do limiting
traffic for Bittorrent), nobody pushes laws about cutting off the
power grid forever people committed some copyright infringement (and
as far as I know, people can use electric devices even in the jails,
at least Britain jails). The price is low, and even the poorest people
can afford it (at least in Europe).

But all is different for the networking. There are constant disputes
about property rights. Some people said that every single page view
must be paid (do you remember that “Penny per page” buzz or more
recent Firefox blocking only for Adblock existance?). Do you remember
the copyrighted video shops shutdown with stopping DRM servers? Or
that case about Facebook policy change?

We don’t have that with the power grid. The only case I know is the 3
times bigger kW price for those who use more than 400kW per month
here in Ukraine – but we have almost the very same in the providers’
traffic plans, and even worse with the mobile roaming tariffs.

The people who fear electricity cut buy generators. But nobody plan
using generators forever, everyone thinks that after some time the
grid supply will be restored. And on the net you can see some sites
with valuable content or some services be turned off forever, or become
priced from the free, or see price increase – for the copyright, profitability or other reasons. So you think about something what will work when the
site might be cut off.

So, on my opinion, if you do value some content – keep it and tools
for working with it as much independent from the net and companies as
you can. Because if it depends on the net or some company – you might
lost it, even forever, or be asked to pay more.

This already happens where I work, in europe, but luckily doesn’t happen so much, and just for few minutes.
Ok, it’s not the same for all the jobs, but most of tech related ones are intrinsically connected to the web nowadays.

It is all fine and dandy to imagine this wonderful utopia but unfortunately there are many, many users on this planet who do not have a fast and reliable internet connection. I myself live in Australia and here our “Fast” internet is a joke. In Australis even when you have what is considered a fast connection it is not what the rest of the world considers fast. Of course there are other countries in some of the less technologically serviced areas of the globe in similar and indeed worse scenarios, so the Cloud is a victim of this technological drought.

Even with the best of systems there will be outages. Whereas in an office situation a company can get by with alternative software/hardware if an individual piece malfunctions the same company cannot function if ALL its main applications and data were to suddenly go offline. This would result in staff being stuck twiddling their thumbs as the cloud evaporates with no suitable software/hardware to perform tasks on. I can’t see that contributing towards healthy financial outcomes for any business.

By all means I see a place for Cloud Computing but not in anywhere as near a big a way as is envisaged at the moment. It can see it as being most effective as an aid to staff who are constantly mobile and needing to be able to operate more effectively than is currently the case. That is where this technology excels, as an adjunct to the existing structure.

All I say is whenever you are getting all excited about this “new” phenomonon just think back to Bill Gates and his elusive dream of a successful Tablet PC. In 2001 Gates said the following,

“The tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available whenever you want it…It’s a PC that is virtually without limits — and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.”

We are all still waiting Bill and I believe the same will go for Cloud Computing. The idea has been floated many times before in different incantations but even though platforms have improved in that time it is still the “Tablet-Type” dream in my opinion.

These days, however, there is a third variable; the average person’s need for processing power may be lower than what is currently available. You might be on to something novel here if it could be shown that since the average computer user has more hardware power than they will ever use, that is no longer an important factor in the equation.

As such, it will all be about bandwidth from now on.

Perhaps widespread installation of WiMax will allow for this shift?

You are 100% right. That is my whole idea. Most of the tech that I mentioned has already been invented. If only it could be ported to a cloud format this would make perfect sense. Secondly it could bring affordable computers to areas like China and India where there are big WiFi networks.

To get a feel for both sides, and to track the history of the last time this question came up, check out information on the Dumb Terminal era – when users had access to a screen and keyboard attached to a mainframe over a network. The dumb terminal did next to nothing, and stored next to nothing; leaving all the heavy lifting to the mainframe.

In this situation dumb terminals are replaced by lightweight cloudbooks, and the mainframe is replaced by a distributed collection of servers.

“In an event that the user would be traveling to an area that internet access is unavailable, information, programs and other data could be downloaded onto the USB key and used on any computer through a dedicated virtual environment.”
This idea is essentially the concept of portable home folders, where a user’s entire environment is compartmentalized and the OS is made aware of it at login. OSX had a short-lived “Home on the iPod” project to do just this, but for some reason, it went away.

The downside is that it would only work on computers running the right OS; otherwise the computer wouldn’t see the user, nor would the applications run. Perhaps, through some form of virtualization of a thin client OS environment, or via WINE-like API translation, this could be abstracted enough to become a cross-platform system?

1) I can’t guarantee I’ll ALWAYS have an internet connection fast enough (or a connection at all) whenever I want to do something. Yes, Yahoo! and Google web mail is nice, and obviously a connection is required to send/receive mail, but word processing? games? (I don’t play online games, unless it’s a Flash platformer);

2) There isn’t ANY player–Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, or any other “web drive”–I’d trust with my documents, photos, MP3s. Never will be. Ever. Period. Amazon’s recent goof with removing 1984 and Animal Farm from everybody’s Kindles is proof of that.

P.S. who has seen Google Chrome OS? it has not yet entered in the field so main player is far, it is not even a player.

1. Local computing is fast.
2. Cloud computing is convenient.
3. Convenient can complement fast, but cannot replace it.

PS modern cloud hype must be thoroughly chilled before consuming.