Can We Actually Make the Jump to Cloud Computing?

Lately, many tech enthusiasts have been giving the idea of cloud computing a serious look. Many feel that in the coming years, we’ll make the switch to storing all of our movies, photos, programs, and games in the cloud. With cloud computing, we will no longer have a desktop to work with. All work will be done through the browser instead. Data will no longer be stored locally; instead, all of our photos and movies will be stored on sites like Flickr and YouTube. Some even go as far as to suggest Windows 7 and OS 10.6 will be the last desktop OSes available. After this, every user will supposedly make the jump to the cloud. In all honestly, this is like people in 1980 saying there will be flying cars in the year 2015. It’s easy to dream about the idea, but the plausibility of it happening any time soon is slim to none.

If we were to move to the cloud, every person would need to constantly be connected to the Internet in order get any work done. If there is no connection, people won’t be able to access their work and programs from their home systems or roaming laptops. AT&T can barely keep up with the demand iPhone users have over its data networks. The amount of demand that would come from everyone shifting their work to the cloud would render any network coverage useless at this point. Even rural areas in America don’t have a local Internet service provider they can turn to. These people have to turn to a satellite service provider, which has a horrible upstream and downstream rate, and is heavily capped. Until a fast, reliable connection is available to everyone in the world, not just the people in America, we can’t move everything to the Internet.

Virgin offers broadband speeds up to 50 MBPS for only $50 a month in the UK. Meanwhile families in the US can pay the same price to AT&T for only 6 MBPS, for a connection which can be completely unreliable. (I know from personal experience.)

PC Gamers are also still going to want to play games. While services like OnLive sound promising, we still have no idea if they will work to full expectations. Even the slightest bit of lag can ruin the entire experience. Even the quality and resolution of the game largely depends on the speed of the connection. Services like OnLive will display a game a lower resolution than a game played locally, and in a compressed format. This doesn’t make sense when you consider how far some enthusiasts will push their machines to get top resolutions and frame rates.

There is also the issue of data storage. The recent issues with the T-Mobile Sidekick show how irresponsible companies can be with your data. By no fault of the user, all of the data that was stored on the Sidekick servers was lost, due to irresponsible actions of the server admins. The only person you can trust with your data is yourself. The only way to ensure your data is safe is to maintain it yourself with a local physical backup.

Instead of moving to the cloud, I feel we will instead sync to the cloud. Data will be stored not only in the cloud, but locally, where apps will still run on the desktop. These apps might draw the data from the cloud, and upload any changes made back to the cloud. If a quick edit is needed, it would be possible to use a cloud based program to make quick edits, or run PowerPoint presentations. This way you wouldn’t have to carry data around with you and hook up your laptop to a projector. Local programs would still run faster however. Even Web services like PayPal take a long time to load each page. Trying to use full tool sets on Web programs can become really tiresome after a while.

What are your thoughts? Can we actually make a jump to solely using cloud based services?