I saw the world in the naughties as a fragmentation between "trust the cloud" and "trust my ipod". In one of those worlds, I would turn up at a terminal, type my access passwords, and would have my digital life at my fingertips.
In the other world, I would carry my trusty (i?)-storage device around, arrive at a terminal, and have my digital life at my fingertips.
The cloud variant seems to have won, but I feel we have lost something. I bought some stuff on the BBC Store (recently announced closed). Although this cloud based service simplified my interaction and allowed my content to be used wherever I was, just from my memory of a password, it finally let me down, by refusing to download, or serve me usable content. The offer of a refund, being not brilliant, as there was no other place to buy the content.
On the other hand, when I have my local DVDs, as long as I keep the kids at arms length, I can expect easily an acceptable life of the media.
I have been on training, where programming styles were suggested to limit band-width, and the explanation was that un-metered bandwidth was a dying thing. This seems to cause the user to pay twice for the same service. They have trusted in the cloud, and can use netflix to watch their stuff, but also have to pay ISP.COM for the bandwidth.
I have loved the creativity and effectiveness of google-docs, where I can see colleagues editing items at the same time as I am, but I feel we may be leaping too early into the cloud infrastructure, when it is not always in your control when you can get internet bandwidth at an affordable level, against the always in your control to deliver a USB disk, or suchlike with the reliable non-cloud solution
Biting the hand that feeds IT
