To Hell Labs: Lay off the wikipedia I hate to agree because I was there for most of it, my first main frame when I was in seventh grade I ever touched was an IBM 360, got to use a VAX CLUSTER in college. I did my programming for that most of the time on a VT100 terminal in a college basement and at home using my Amiga 2000HD with VLT emulator...
After college I ended up doing work on projects for Disney CDROMs, on Macs and Windows PCs of the era. I had them all connected to a series of Windows NT 3.51 servers and the company bought a sparcstation and had about 25 Next Cubes (the old 68030 types) and about 10-15 next stations (68040s) and a few "white" box x86 NeXT Pizza box type machines with pure intel hardware.. I remember the company installing openstep and saying "YUCK" and deciding to depart for a completely windows environment at the time..
Since then I do work on Expression Studio, mainly Expression Blend and I do cloud apps as well using Windows Azure.. Microsoft doesn't really need to sell the cloud to anyone but developers because it's a developer technology. You as a consumer or business would use the cloud on a pc, and phone or even a tablet and not even know that you were doing so..
Is it overhyped ?? I don't think so.. Does it mean local storage won't be needed, EXTREMELY DOUBTFUL.. On my iphone one of my favorite apps is a wifi hard drive.. I just can use the drive in the device over my wifi connection..
Is Microsoft selling the cloud to developers? Sure do think they are..
http://www.azurebootcamp.com/How many people use the cloud right now??
Ever use google docs?
Every use backupify to backup your social media accounts?
Ever use Microsoft office web apps (I do on my free 20 gig skydrive)..
http://news.office-watch.com/t/n.aspx?a=1318Have I ever lost anything? No
Might I? maybe, but I like redundancy..
Remember the ipad and iphone are devices not full PCs not running full Mac OS..
This is the whole notion of charging for software as a service not having to license it or own it..
I am developing a Windows Phone 7 app in Silverlight right now that runs on Macs, full PCs with Windows, Linux boxes and Windows Phones (series 7) that uses the cloud and it makes thing much much easier.. I am also using OData (Open Data protocol)..
I think the cloud is a big part of our future, but like anything else it could be used in a bad way..
