"well thats where computing is heading, and the future looks pretty grim to me."

My personal prediction is that it wont happen as quickly and smoothly as some of the "cloud Dreamers" may think or hope.

Take for example the home video market.
After a short lived format war between HDDVD and Blue-ray BR emerged victorious which seemed to portend the end of the Standard DVD market for both content and hardware.
Bill gates asserted that it did not matter who won the aforementioned format war because the physical disc as a delivery format for home movies, was "Doomed".

But what do we see today
in any official home release of a major hollywood
Film??

The "combo pack"
A Blue Ray Disc +Standard DVD, and a "Digital Copy" in the cloud

They realized that unlike VCR's that World is still Flooded perfectly functional and low cost Standard DVD players and large numbers of people who Do not understand or just dont care about seeing everything in glorious 1080pi.

So they still offer the DVD's for them the BR for the "cutting edgers" and the
Digital "cloud copy" for the uber tech savvy,mobile "bleeding edgers'.
Now considering the number of laptops and Desktop PC's and Macs still
in that hands of people who desire to have their applications installed locally
it does not seem like to me that such market will be completely obsolete for some time in favor of some Empty box that is useless without a broadband feed tube

"the amount of software and games that are shipping recently that require uninterrupted internet access to run their DRM is alarming."

Indeed it is however sometimes it has the unintended effect of creating a vibrant alternative market for Slightly Older hardware and user community home brewed software& content to run on it

this is Exactly what has occurred with the Sony PSP hand held gaming system
as they moved from UMD media Disc based games to Download only version of all their content.
The " PSP home brew" community created their own alternative firmware for the PSP
Along with Content that is in many way far more versatile than the officially supported releases from sony.
this has also caused the resale value of older  PSP's to remain abnormally high.

"look at how apple abuses the closed platform and you will see where cloud computing is headed."

Consider ,however that if this Cloud Model Take soff as expected  then  Draconian Closed systems Like Apple will be in Peril Due to competing ecosystems that offer similar quality
Content.
Particularly considering hardware costs
Understand this:
I am a long time Mac user
but the android market is a viable competitor to the Apple IOS
at this point and,according to business tech reports, right now the number two selling tablet after the Ipad is My new" kindle fire"at $200 USD verses $499 for an Ipad.
and most of the android based "smart phones" can be had for less than the Iphone.

So I do wonder how long apple will be able to justify the cost of its IOS hardware devices.

Cheers

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