@philwainewright Why are all bloggers seeing HTML5 and the mystical "cloud" as the solution to all problems? They may help solve specific business problems, but there are easily as many problems as there are good points. The two biggest problems seem to get brushed under the rug by all the clingers who wish to seem cool by jumping blindly on the "cloud everything" bandwagon.
1. If one user's desktop applications stop working, only that user is affected. If a cloud service goes down, EVERYONE who depends on that service is affected. One need only look at recent outages in Google and Amazon cloud services for an example of this. The potential cost to business of having every user in the company unable to perform their daily functions is astronomical. This was part of the reason companies moved away from mainframes to desktop computing, but everyone seems to forget that time period.
2. For people who travel, the cloud is not always available. Sitting on an airplane during a cross-country flight means you can't get any work done when your applications are hosted elsewhere. Even having an unreliable Internet connection can reduce productivity by large amounts. Desktop applications do not suffer from this problem.
3. Any information which is not hosted locally or which travels over communication channels not under the complete control of the owner is subject to potential snooping. There is no such thing as 100% secure. There is risk involved in all cloud transactions. This is just reality.
Yes, HTML5 is a good thing. The cloud, used judiciously, is also a good thing. Neither will replace desktop computing. The problem is, most bloggers are so caught up in the hype that they are not taking real-world scenarios into account. They are simply fanning the flames of disinformation and not helping their readers make more informed decisions about when these technologies are appropriate. The headlong rush to replace native applications and desktop computing with the cloud and HTML5 is going to cause a lot of heartache in the future.
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