> Why can’t we do this easily yet? Well, because it's distributed computing. Distributed computing is hard... really hard! Especially for applications requirin

> Why can’t we do this easily yet? Well, because it's distributed computing. Distributed computing is hard... really hard! Especially for applications requiring any level of real-time-ish interactivity between different users. Two computers talking to each other in a room via a server in Virginia is not absurd. The physical distance is abstracted over completely, the application engineer needn't think about that at all, that's the beauty and point of protocols like tcp/ip. What cannot be abstracted over is the single source of truth in the networked system (the server) that makes a whole class of really hard problems go away. So as much as you can describe the remote server as a problem, because of latency perhaps, it is a vastly lesser problem than the distributed computing ones that'd be introduced in the alternative! That is the basic reason why things are the way they are, it's really not absurd or surprising at all, in my opinion.