All the Cloud's A Staging Env, and All the Laptops Merely Clients This fantasy has been pushed since at least 1996 but that really died off when mainframes wer

All the Cloud's A Staging Env, and All the Laptops Merely Clients This fantasy has been pushed since at least 1996 but that really died off when mainframes were no longer the only option. Sure, my old Wyse terminal fits the bill but I have not powered that thing on since ... actually I don't remember where I left it. Cloud providers will always be a thing and local software daemons will always be a thing. There is a time and purpose for both. Anyway, I tried to convince some development teams to go this route some time ago and use Chromebooks with Citrix farms so that their work remains in a safe location. That idea died faster than I came up with it. There were entire teams that would have outright quit had I forced the issue. We did use that concept for some sensitive customer data debugging but never for development or staging. General purpose computation on your own machine is probably going to be illegal in 20 years... Some companies would love for us to believe that. Maybe some day politicians will be lobbied into making some services cloud-only. Unless their business model already fits being cloud-only I would expect such legislation to bankrupt some businesses or hurt them enough that the SEC or someone else that cares about tax revenue intervenes. Microsoft has been trying to move Windows in this direction, to require an internet connection and connectivity to their cloud and accounts on their public AD servers. The latest IBM/Redhat Fedora Beta hints at moving in this direction as well. I do not participate in such things but that is my personal preference.