Putting your fate in someone else's hands is simply not a good idea. You may get away with doing so once or twice, but eventually you will get bitten very badly. As for the old mainframes: when I was in college we switched away from them to PCs, and it was the greatest liberation there was. There is no way I'll give up my PCs for terminals in the future.
This guy and cloud advocates need to realize that the computer industry is becoming increasingly user oriented - vs. admin oriented. Users demand greater and greater user experiences which keep thin client computing at bay. Now cloud computing will grow to support some of the scenarios the guy cited in the video. But I don't see how on earth it will displace the desire for rich clients by users which wield ultimate power. Cloud computing for the most part will extend current IT within the business and consumer worlds. It will not displace them.
At the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, Jeffrey Birnbaum, managing director and chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch, speaks about using cloud computing to reduce complexities and costs in financial services. He discusses the move away from dedicated machines and why ideas old like virtualization have become useful again.
