Wow, I am surprised I did not get downvoted into oblivion for my previous post. However, I am convinced that you're missing a point by a mile. Nobody has commi

Wow, I am surprised I did not get downvoted into oblivion for my previous post. However, I am convinced that you're missing a point by a mile. Nobody has committed their photo collections to flickr, because it is insane: people generate gigabytes of images with their cameras and upload only a tiny fraction of what they have, most of the time downsampled to a manageable size. Moreover, the sizes of image files (JPEGs) keep growing, while uploading speeds have stuck at 20-60kb/sec for 95% users. This pattern is true not only for images, it's true for everything: the speed at which people generate data is only accelerating - from simple text documents we've moved to music, images, video and god knows what else. Sticking everything into the "cloud" will not work. Even today an average PC has tens of gigabytes of data. Soon that number will reach terabytes. Think about X-megapixel cameras, recorded TV shows, HD-movies, etc. The size of the backup drives will keep growing, while the speeds of internet connections will not. Internet is a distributed computing platform with very powerful computing nodes (your computers). The opportunities of exploiting this are fascinating. SETI is a great example of using Internet right. Skype and torrents are another ones. What these cloud companies are doing, however, is plain stupid in comparison: they're sucking in the computational complexity from "powerful nodes" only to re-distribute the load on their end onto their own nodes without any hope to keep up. What for? I know that Microsoft is out of fashion today, but Ray Ozzie is absolutely right when he is talking about maintaining a reasonable (sane!) balance between client machines and "clouds". This point of view is not terribly popular among some YC readers, who are too fascinated and tempted by a slight chance of getting rich by re-implementing 2% of some perfectly fine desktop software in 2 months with a handful of python scripts running on cheap Amazon servers.