I recently wrote about migrating home computing to the cloud. One of my observations about why I like the cloud was that apps started faster than an equivalent app running on my six-year-old PC. The cloud seemed to extend the life of my PC. It just needed to be good enough to run a browser. I hate throwing away a PC that just works because it needs to be faster to handle up-to-date, often bloated application software.

I do a lot of creative writing and brainstorming. When an idea occurs to me, I want to open a document and download it, now, while the ideas come up.

I didn’t like Microsoft Word, my main writing tool, because it took… a long time… to… launch. And even when it seemed to be ready for my use, I was still… doing… things… behind… the… scene: I would type and nothing would show up. at times

Instead, I can open Google Docs and can start typing almost immediately. Also, I never had to “save” the document. It was always saved for me. I have never lost anything unlike in Word where I lose a lot of work on a regular basis. Yes, I manually save with Word every few minutes – saving is a regular move I’ve been doing for decades, but something always happens eventually. Always. Cloud-based Google Docs seemed to work more intuitively (for example, no need to save, what was that all about with Word? So last decade) and faster.

However, I have noticed a recent change. With Google Docs, I enabled “Gears”. This allows my PC to do more work. It allows me to edit offline. The problem is that I open a document and then a screen appears showing how it syncs with my PC. Yuck. For! I don’t mind. I want to write. Now.

That reminded me of all the apps my software development teams had written. Every time we wanted to “start over” and make a better app, all too often we rediscovered that many of the things we didn’t like about the old software were needed even in the new software. Many relate to security and performance. Others were all those features that we thought nobody used. We want those things. They can slow down the application. Being secure and robust can cause additional performance issues. Making sure the customer gets what they want can require a series of time-consuming questions or displaying status updates on the screen.

So my concern is that as personal cloud-based apps (eg Google Docs, QuickenOnline.com, IDrive.com, etc.) mature, they will slowly become what we already have on the individual PC. Problems included. The advantage of accessibility everywhere and speed will be severely limited by security and the need for security (for example, I will not lose my job). Then we will have migrated everything to the cloud, with no net benefit, except to the wonderful people who brought us the capabilities of the cloud. Now they have our business. What a nice deal… for them. Will we be better?

I still like the cloud approach to home computing. Who can complain about free productivity apps (writing, spreadsheets, financial software, etc.) and almost unlimited storage? However, reality is beginning to set in, and like all information technology initiatives, I now see the difference between the promise and what it is actually about. Next, we hear the series of promises: “We’ll have that feature in the next version! Then it will do everything you could do on your PC.”