The Cloud for "Personal" Computing - What problems does it solve?

[nslay]

Let's take a step back for a minute ... what problem did this Cloud concept originally solve? What does it solve now?

NOTE: Let me clarify that what I mean by Cloud isn't really the Cloud in the sense of cheaper and faster hosting and deployment (as it was designed for), but the abused concept to mean the centralized computing from the past century.

Back in the days of MULTICS, computer hardware was the stuff of companies, governments, universities and labs. No ordinary user could afford this hardware (and at the time with limited applications, who would want to?). It made sense to centralize computing and interface relatively inexpensive terminals with the computer.

But this isn't the case anymore. Computers, tablets and phones are already relatively cheap and relatively powerful computing devices. So, what kinds of pressing problems does the Cloud solve for home users? Comments? I'm very curious to hear this ... how can you justify this when phones already have 2 and 4 cores? Do we need to offload computation for typical phone applications? Come on...

From my point of view, the Cloud solves no problem for home users. I would say it introduces several problems, namely the Internet connection speeds will never match local hardware bus speeds. This is especially problematic when you want to interface input devices (e.g. like HD video cameras) and files with the cloud (especially if the connection is already under load and ISPs also severely limit upload speeds). There is also the issue of privacy and Internet and Cloud subscription dependency ... and this abuse of the browser. The browser wasn't designed to supplant serious game engines - it simply wasn't designed to do this or, for example, World of Warcraft and other Cloud-like games would use that instead of writing their own thin clients.

The way I understand it, this Cloud technology was designed to solve hosting and deployment problems ... how did it change into the thinking of the 1960s? It's one big scam in my opinion ... either a ploy to control IP or to collect usage information.

[iago]

It solves the problem of Patching.

[rabbit]

It solves the problem of there not being a Cloud.  Basically, it's a sham for 98% of what it's being marketed for.

[MyndFyre]

It solves the problem of there not being a Cloud.  Basically, it's a sham for 98% of what it's being marketed for.

[MyndFyre]

OK, seriously though.

I do happen to like Google Music.  That's pretty handy.

I also like, in theory, the ability as a developer to have a completely abstracted hardware model. 

That's about it, though.