*We're moving toward a computing world where hard drives don't even exist.* That...

nl · on May 1, 2012

That will only happen when my pipe hits SATA speed.

I dunno.

GMail is orders of magnitude faster in every way than my work Outlook installation.

Google Docs is much quicker to start & use than Office.

I've often used online image editors rather than start Photoshop.

Yes, if I had a SSD on my work computer it might help, but still I think there is an important principle here..

hdevalence · on May 1, 2012

Sure, but compare your pipe speed today with your pipe speed ten years ago. I don't think that it's out of the realm of possibility that we will begin to see devices with no local storage within three years.

Take Google Music, for instance. You can have 200 GB of music "on your phone", even though none of it is actually stored on your phone.

w1ntermute · on May 1, 2012

> Sure, but compare your pipe speed today with your pipe speed ten years ago.

Actually, things haven't improved much in this department for the vast majority of Americans.

ori_b · on May 1, 2012

It hasn't increased nearly as much as my HDD speed.

commandar · on May 2, 2012

>Sure, but compare your pipe speed today with your pipe speed ten years ago.

You mean the 3Mbs DSL I had 10 years ago versus the 3Mbs DSL that's still the fastest thing available at my house today?

vacri · on May 1, 2012

and then we also run into contention - the more people wirelessly streaming, the less bandwidth each gets. Add in that with the cloud, there are more links in the chain that can go wrong, plus you frequently get transient outages (instead of the rare catastrophic ones with local storage), and it's not a zero sum game. Some things are fine in the cloud. Some really aren't.