Even if you are avoiding Google-sized tasks, there turn out to be advantages to treating your local machine as a dumb terminal. One is that remote machines can

Even if you are avoiding Google-sized tasks, there turn out to be advantages to treating your local machine as a dumb terminal. One is that remote machines can be rented instead of being bought. Another is that the configuration of everything becomes easier. You buy new laptops by taking them out of the box, running a handful of app installers, and moving over a SSH key or two and an encrypted password file. Your career as amateur sysadmin might just be over. (If you miss the chance to build your own Linux kernel, of course, there's plenty of work left for you as a cloud sysadmin. But cloud system admin is also usually easier, because machines in data centers come with nifty administration tools, like SANs and dashboards, that benefit from economies of scale.) Security: When you lose the "dumb terminal" you lose no data. You do lose the keys that are on the machine, but you can revoke those. And it is much, much easier to get consistent automated backups on a datacenter box than on a laptop. There are definite problems with the "cloud" approach, such as "who owns the data and how do you trust it is being handled properly", but the advantages are strong these days.