It's not just the speed of "generally available" Internet Connection (I am still working on ADSL - getting 12M/bit/sec download), or what can be done on cloud based servers (even cloud based virtual servers - where you don't have a clue where data and programs are stored/operating from or indeed who by).NickWalker wrote: ↑11 Oct 2022 21:47There will certainly be software running on our own computers for decades to come but more and more people will move away from that. As I said, this won't be immediate and indeed many people don't have access to fast enough Internet connections yet.
I think and hope that home hardware is about to "get itself sorted". Cheap Chromebooks are pointing the way - not much more than clever terminals. Do I want a new high spec lap top pushing £1,500 to even £2,000 or a cheap Chromebook at £200? At the moment it is the laptop, but if "Home Hubs" got organised ...
You have in effect a router/server connected to Gigabit internet (or whatever) and to your Sky Dish, 9g mobile, your old aerial, to a local RAID storage array, DVD changer and local Wifi. Your "Chromebooks" (possibly one per room, one per room user?), your smart phones, your "remote controls", even your old PCs, run an app that says "take this input" (local disk, internet cloud, sky disk etc.) and "output it on ..." (my smart phone, my chromebook, my living room TV) and in addition put the sound on the hi-fi speakers, and take input from my kitchen keyboard. (All by finger dragging on a screen - or voice controlled by the bastard love-child of Alexa and Cortana - or even CITT?) Then almost anything runs on almost anything. (And the embedded microchip in your neck ensures that everything follows you as you move through the house, get in your car (driverless of course), ...).
At that point we would probably cease to care where stuff is, we just subscribe to services (hopefully with money, not with our privacy and personal data). We also lose sight of whether it arrives over the 9g network, over fibre or from cached stuff on your RAID array - so instead of specifying our inputs, we just specify what we want.
If all that happens, perhaps applications running from a local disk on a local PC may have had their day?
. But IT is moving to the cloud, many businesses no longer run their own servers, for most normal people the online version of MS Word is good enough and they don't need most of the features of the full desktop application, they listen to music streamed from the cloud rather than owning it, etc.
) That way, we needn't lose any software abilities we have now and we wouldn't really notice much about the Cloudification. I think... (Not sure if Citrix - which I'm referring to simply because it's the thing I was once familiar with - can cope with poor internet connections though.)