As soon as people get a real taste of the ramifications of the governments data collection and spying on it’s own citizens, they’ll wake up and vote with their dollars. Decentralized personal computing is the best thing to happen to democratic republics in the last half century, but it requires personal action and responsibility; cloud computing is a nanny-state-type solution looking for a problem to solve, and promises the user doesn’t have to worry about such nasty little problems like data security and privacy (of which you will have none). Credit card and banking systems are failing left and right with real dollars right now, and those are supposedly secure – just wait until your on-line private data (medical, photos, videos) start showing up unintended publicly online for the world to view.

Electrical grids are getting close to the breaking point, enough so that standby generators are now common items at many stores. The ‘green’ folks talk about decentralizing power generation with solar and wind on household rooftops. Why should we want to centralize our data now only to revert to desktops when the clouds start raining our data one day, and disappearing the next day?

Compute power as a utility but the home appliances matter. Design cultures like Apple will dominate the home computing appliances. But that’s not enough, as you point out we will need clever implementation – tie-in to the compute cloud resources while keeping your private data private and sharing with only those you want to share with.

A great analogy that deserves more thought.

I think the Halifax air is very good for your creativity.

Cheers, D