But most things works well most of the time. Transferring state between devices? That's the cloud.
And all we had to give up was security, privacy, reliability, longevity, speed and more money. :-(
Unfortunately, as with so many adverse consequences when IT goes wrong, most non-technical people don't really understand the risks until something bad happens to them, and by then it's too late. In fact, these days with the trend for trying to outsource IT instead of maintaining in-house expertise, even a lot of technical staff don't seem to understand or properly control the risks. Just look at how many businesses grind to a halt every time one of the major cloud services has a significant outage.
The move to Internet-hosted services and subscription-based products is entirely understandable from the industry's point of view: it gives them lots of new ways to exploit their customers and make more money.
However, from the customer's point of view, I think we would be much better off if we invested more effort in decentralisation, standardisation and interoperability, and "private clouds" and VPNs. There are few advantages for customers to having important functionality reliant on a very small number of huge service providers, as opposed to having many smaller providers able to offer compatible variations and having options for self-hosting with decent remote access and backup provisions.
Unfortunately, we seem to have reached a kind of equilibrium now where the huge players are so utterly dominant in their industries that disruption is all but impossible. Their worst case is that they buy out any potential serious threats before they're big enough to become actual threats, but much of the time, the lock-in effects create sufficient barriers to entry to protect the incumbent anyway. There is no longer effective competition or disruption in many IT-related markets, just a lot of walled gardens where you pick your poison and then drink as much of it as they tell you.
I'm sorry to say I don't see any easy way to break the stranglehold the tech giants now have and get some competition and interoperability back into the industry. It's going to take someone (or possibly a lot of someones) offering products and services that are both competitive in their own right and built with a more open culture in mind to disrupt the status quo now, and it's hard to see either startup businesses or community-led efforts achieving escape velocity any time soon.
And all we had to give up was security, privacy, reliability, longevity, speed and more money. :-(
Unfortunately, as with so many adverse consequences when IT goes wrong, most non-technical people don't really understand the risks until something bad happens to them, and by then it's too late. In fact, these days with the trend for trying to outsource IT instead of maintaining in-house expertise, even a lot of technical staff don't seem to understand or properly control the risks. Just look at how many businesses grind to a halt every time one of the major cloud services has a significant outage.
The move to Internet-hosted services and subscription-based products is entirely understandable from the industry's point of view: it gives them lots of new ways to exploit their customers and make more money.
However, from the customer's point of view, I think we would be much better off if we invested more effort in decentralisation, standardisation and interoperability, and "private clouds" and VPNs. There are few advantages for customers to having important functionality reliant on a very small number of huge service providers, as opposed to having many smaller providers able to offer compatible variations and having options for self-hosting with decent remote access and backup provisions.
Unfortunately, we seem to have reached a kind of equilibrium now where the huge players are so utterly dominant in their industries that disruption is all but impossible. Their worst case is that they buy out any potential serious threats before they're big enough to become actual threats, but much of the time, the lock-in effects create sufficient barriers to entry to protect the incumbent anyway. There is no longer effective competition or disruption in many IT-related markets, just a lot of walled gardens where you pick your poison and then drink as much of it as they tell you.
I'm sorry to say I don't see any easy way to break the stranglehold the tech giants now have and get some competition and interoperability back into the industry. It's going to take someone (or possibly a lot of someones) offering products and services that are both competitive in their own right and built with a more open culture in mind to disrupt the status quo now, and it's hard to see either startup businesses or community-led efforts achieving escape velocity any time soon.