People want control. People want privacy. But people have to pay a price.
It used to be that I had a mainframe. My users paid 50 cents per cylinder (about .6MB) per day for storage. It was not as if they could have moved to PCs, which had 10MB hard drives. Disk space was very expensive all around, and running a mainframe was very expensive. But the users got security. It was far more secure than what users have on their desktops today. They got privacy. They got daily backups to tape, and two copies were made. One was kept in the computer room library, which was safe and secure, and the other was kept off site in an armored fireproof vault that was administered by a security company. They also had RAID5 before most people had a clue what it meant, so loss of any data due to a crash was almost impossible (it never happened) so short of a disaster, even the last few hours of data was reasonably safe.
If there was a crash, there was also a recovery. These days, those few who back things up rarely have a strategy for putting a network back together if the need arises, and there are few utilities that allow you to automatically assemble pieces from a variety of backups, as we had back then.
As things moved to local storage, costs dropped. But people gave up a lot. If anything went wrong, the true loss was far greater than what they may have saved in the interim.
We don't need to go back to mainframes, but the notion that whatever I do is stored locally, and if I need to use a computer at the other end of the country, my desktop would have to look different and I might not have my applications and data is many steps backward from the old days.
Google cannot get a monopoly on anything that is easy for somebody else to implement. They cannot get a monopoly on something that somebody else can afford to implement. They cannot get a monopoly on something that a user can do without.
Let them build something better, make it cost effective, and guarantee my privacy. If it's easier for somebody to break a single pane of glass in your house, go through your window, and take all your data than it would be to higher the best hackers or spies to get it from Google, then your data is not safer at home.
In the mean time, we've seen the advantages of centralization. The web itself is as mainframe-like as you can get; the system you are running now is essentially coming from somebody's web server, and the browser is a modern day smart equivalent of a dumb terminal. It's not that it's unimportant, but it's not the application, and that's a strength. You need not install the latest version of ZiffDavis or Citibank to read this forum or do your banking. Having your data somewhere else makes it portable too. Users already do this with on-line financial data, or with a Gmail type system. POP3 should have died out years ago when IMAP was introduced, but anybody who uses POP3 who ever had a crash, needed to read mail and keep it in sync on multiple computers, or needed to move from one computer to another knows, local storage is full of problems.
That's not saying that you can't have things locally. IMAP keeps copies of everything locally if you want. But if my entire computer gets wiped out, I lose none of my email or any of its folders, and merely reinstalling my client puts me back in business.
Google finally woke up the world when they made people notice that giving users 2GB of storage is far cheaper than it was to give 10MB for email when the Internet started to become popular. But ISPs stayed in the dark.
Google can afford to give us a lot. They cannot afford to be undercut by competition, and that's exactly what will happen if they get greedy or sloppy.
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