If you don't think this is the way of the future, you are crazy. As a software consultant, I can tell you right now that any company who isn't trying to push their software offerings in the 'cloud' will eventually be dead. Let me give you a couple examples of industry disruptions, and let me remind you that each of these companies were thought of as a "fad" in the beginning.
CRM - Salesforce.com
ERP - Workday.com
Storage - DropBox
Music - Pandora
If there is ANYTHING I know of, it is software trending... Do you think in 10 years your phone will have 128GB+ storage? No way, it isn't needed. Once wireless networks are able to perform fast enough to feed all data as you need it, storage on devices will start disappearing and you will be left with services only. iOS in the cloud, for example (iOS 15 maybe? lol)
While I recognize that this is the direction things are going, I really hope that such moves are taken with a sense of balance. Right now, it's not hard to go somewhere that you have weak or no network connectivity. I recently visited my uncle in northern Washington (state), and the cellular data connection was showing as being at Edge levels when at his house (though that usually meant that it would try to connect for a while before concluding that it couldn't), and if we drove five minutes in any direction, except one (toward the nearest larger city), even the voice connection dropped to nothing. During this visit, my wife finished a book on her Kindle and wanted to grab a new one from her Kindle library, but couldn't. At the same time, I chose also decided to start a new book on my iPad, which I could do because the library was local.
Another example, I recently flew on a plane. Because of the way that iOS Pages works, I was able to continue working on a document while in flight, without any network connection. Once network was reestablished, the document was synced. If I only had web based services available to me, I would have been SOL.
So, I can see the trend. It is a trend that I will resist, to a degree. I like to keep things resident in local form. I don't have a problem with utilizing them, but I don't want to see all services go over to them.
One final point, and this might make me seem like something of an alarmist, but oh well. In the event of a major disaster, net based services could be down for a long time, whereas local based apps would still function.
In many ways this comes down to the argument between centralized vs. distributed. This has been seen in many areas, and keeps coming up in computing circles. Usually, the pendulum swings back toward distributed computing fairly quickly, because without that, our devices can be very easily rendered completely useless in any number of circumstances...
yes... maybe BETA 7 will be able to handle it properly.
