Yes, there are experimental “cloud” services that deal with heavy computational tasks - I’m not disputing that (how long has Folding@Home been going? etc). What I’m disputing is that these services are *better* than having your own hardware on hand.

As technology grows, so do expectations, and so do the demands on our hardware and software. When expectations finally hit a point where the steps become incrementally smaller (think biotech AR), then you can start revising the necessity for home hardware.

I would love nothing more than to simply have a dumb terminal and an internet connection at home, and rest assured that my data and programs are being housed in a facility that’s governed and secured better than my house could ever be.

We’re just not there yet. Major corporates drive most of the desktop/server IT purchasing decisions, and they’re sticking to their guns with local hardware for the time being.

~ Wogan

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Movie rendering and CAD are already going that way.
Gaming will go that way with huge dividends opening up more power to gamers than was power locally and more collaboration. Augmented reality would seem to be primarily a cloud task and a local compression decompression task.

I think its is for political leverage reasons that the local systems will survive but I don’t expect local mediums like plastic disk to survive.

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