The future of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the present. Companies would much rather rent you services on a monthly basis than sell you software and convince you to upgrade often enough to fund development. The United States government also likes it, at the moment, because the laws distinguish your accounts on someone else’s server from content on your computer.

It’s probably not the future, just because there are some tasks that are just better to do locally. We lose sight of this a lot, which is why you can look at history and see how computing becomes alternately remote and local, as one or the other becomes more economical and everybody says, this, this is the future And it’s the future for, like, another five to ten years and then we slide in the other direction.

For the moment, there’s a push in the corporate world to cloud services, because it’s an easier business. But that’s not necessarily sustainable as people start thinking about privacy or need to cut costs, and for just about everything you might need, there’s probably an open source project that can be run locally, instead.