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#1
If Windows 8 goes primarily "cloud" who will be on board?
I for one will never allow my personal info or programs to rely solely on an available internet connection.
I for one will never allow my personal info or programs to rely solely on an available internet connection.
Not me.
But I could not believe that MS would be so shortsighted as to make it an "only" situation. It seems a more likely scenario that the cloud will be an available feature for those who can and want to use it, but your "standalone" system would continue to be available "Legacy" style.
Did you read this somewhere or are you just speculating?
Bandwidth is expensive, slow or plain unavailable in a lot of countries and who wants the OS hogging it? As for data privacy, the corporates would be most worried, individuals already have a lot of important stuff stashed away in their email accounts/drives, picasa, facebook etc.
Net only Operating Systems will never work. Humans are just too paranoid as a whole to allow a corporation to store their data for them. Not to mention Internet Connections are metered in many parts of the world, slow, potentially unreliable, and that's just a few problems. Internet OSes only work under the following conditions:
- Unmetered
- Fast (over 100mbps each direction)
- Reliable
But most importantly, suppose the central server goes offline. Have fun using your "computer" oh wait that's right YOU CAN'T.
A cloud only OS would not be that popular as to users concerns over privacy and security, I would try it but as for banking data etc I would be doubtful.
The advantages of a cloud based environment is that;
1). Data is not stored locally. So, if laptop is lost or stolen, personal information doesn't get lost since it was never on the device
2). People want their data everywhere they are. They want it on their computers, tablets, phones, etc. Having it in the cloud facilitates this.
A great many people will be attracted to both of these reasons. If you don't believe that, look at the number of people who switched from using mail clients like Outlook and Thunderbird and instead went to something like Gmail.
No working unless online? Doesn't seem right to me. As an option, sure, but as the main method, hard to picture. A Guy
These days, the Internet connection that I have at my house is like any other utility. I expect that it will be there and be up and running...just like the electricity, gas and water. I honestly have experienced very few Internet outages in the past few years....in fact....I'd almost say that I have had more power outages than Internet outages.
And in the event that my home internet connection is down, I "could" if necessary tether my laptop to my cellular phone and access the Internet that way. So there are at least options. Another option might be to move my laptop to a free wi-fi hotspot and access my data from there. While not the most convenient....more than possible. I cannot remember the last time I was able to pick up my TV and haul it into McDonalds to watch a movie when my power was out.
I come originally from the UNIX world and that's where I'm going to be as soon as Windows forces me to hold any of my data online. (for practical reasons I probably use one of the then actual Linux flavors).
Until then I'll stick with W7 until it's not supported anymore.Power to the people. Redmond doesn't tell me what to do PERIOD
-DG