One of the big selling points of early cloud products (like GMail) was that specialist hardware outperformed local hardware. It just happened to be in the clou

One of the big selling points of early cloud products (like GMail) was that specialist hardware outperformed local hardware. It just happened to be in the cloud. You got to store your data on a limitless specialized server platform instead of your little hard drive. The irony now is that a terabyte hard drive for a laptop costs very little. A lot of business devices have plenty of space that is completely unused. So we spend our lives downloading from SharePoint/OneDrive/Outlook etc.