I don't disagree that there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. I also don't disagree that 99% of what the cloud offers is solved by a good laptop with regular ba

I don't disagree that there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. I also don't disagree that 99% of what the cloud offers is solved by a good laptop with regular backups. But that's kind of like saying 99% of what twitter offers can be solved with public mailing lists and a character limit. That doesn't mean twitter isn't worth using or creating. (OK maybe not the best example since I don't use twitter myself but you get the idea.) And what about this scenario, which isn't too far fetched in my opinion: your ISP provides you with private cloud storage, a software stack, and your own dns name for you to host your own private web-accessible applications, each installable with one click. There is still the problem of reliable internet access, but in time I think we all know internet access will be as ubiquitous as electric power and we will trust our ISP just like we trust our power company: we completely ignore them until the power goes out for a day, we get really mad, wait for them to fix it, and then forget it ever happened.