That's a good perspective of what the client-side functionality should be. I've had an idea on what the hardware-side or "the cloud" should be for a while... T

That's a good perspective of what the client-side functionality should be. I've had an idea on what the hardware-side or "the cloud" should be for a while... The strangest thing about "the cloud" as it stands today is that it's really just Amazon, Google and Apple with giant server farms. Something goes wrong with the server farm, the whole thing crashes. This is not "the cloud". At some point in the near future I think someone will work out a way to construct a true cloud that has the ability to harness any node on the Internet. Think something like SETI@home, BOINC, Folding@home but where clients install a program, set aside how much space (in GBs) they'd like to offer and they get rewarded over time (money, points, currency, prizes etc). As I upload things to this true cloud, the files are split, encrypted and distributed around this cloud in such a way that backups are made, redundancy and security is inbuilt. If I'm storing 10GBs of other people's files, I can't access them since they're only partial segments and they're encrypted. If I turn off my computer, the file owners can still access their files from other nodes hosting backups. And files are hosted on nearby nodes to ensure speedy access. It would be a rather difficult software engineering problem to solve, but ultimately this is the future of the cloud.