I’ve installed Google Desktop for some useful and fun gadgets to fill my second monitor with. Currently the GMail gadget is indexing five years worth of email which is going to take ages. I had a look through my mail and found my first GMail ever, it was the welcome message, look
First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations.
A whole gigabyte of space for email! crazy! 
You know what? Five years and eighteen thousand emails later, I’ve only used 700MB. I now have seven gig of space, it’s going to take a long long time to fill that.
I’ve got one of those Google Wave accounts too, but it’s not that useful. I seem to recall mention of it having the ability to work in businesses, on their own servers. I like cloud computing, but I don’t trust other people with my data. I’d much prefer if I could run my own cloud on my machine here. Some sort of Google Docs server would be great, I’d use that all the time. Something where my server is the main store, but then Google’s system is a mirror, with edits and changes magically propagating throughout the whole system. Local data with remote access and off-site backup, all in one system without any extra steps required. That’d be a killer system.
I don’t think people trust the likes of MS or Google with their business data. They’d rather keep hold of it, even if they have a lot of expense and hassle to maintain the infrastructure to keep it within their controls.
And the impression that I get is that if you entrust your data to someone else and they do as they see fit or lose it..then you’re screwed basically.
I think that there’s something in human nature that has a need to ‘possess’ what it sees as being its own, but alternatively if you don’t keep a hand on the reins you will lose it, like what happened to the Roman Empire when they started giving up what they’d built because they didn’t seem able to keep control of it any longer. Lethargy and complacency that someone else will do it for you. And at that point you’re doomed.
I suppose there’s some happy medium where you neither hold on too tightly for fear of loss or become apathetic, but unfortunately it has to be forever as you neither reach one state or the other. It’s very difficult to do that. Look at America after the cold war and the British Empire before that..if they didn’t have fear and hatred of a continuous enemy as a motivator, then the culture of that empire would have fallen apart ages ago.
So the mindset of business and free enterprise will never trust cloud computing to manage it’s essential data, as you’re effectively entrusting a crocodile with your children. It’s suspicion and competition that fuels enterprise. Can you trust MS not to get hungry and enjoy a snack under the auspices of the Free Market?
I think also that the reason that somethings exist and are maintained is due to mutual benefit as allowing them to be destroyed for short term gain does not aid anyone.
For example, the road system..or education. Libraries, all these are public resources paid for by taxes. The internet is another phenomena that aids everyone. It runs on a series of different servers all owned by different people, but the reason that it has not become a balkanized collection of non-cooperative networks is because it is to the advantage of all people, including business interests.
The reason that MS can’t own the internet is because it would never be able to control it fully. They may have Windows, but they can’t insist that it runs on every machine everywhere.
One of the reasons that in Deus Ex that everything fell apart is that the Aquinus Protocol that ran on every server as a “safe secure networking option” was basically a pretext to installing a computer AI to run things. Of course when the people who ran it failed, you got The Collapse. Things were already falling apart, this was merely a solution to bring it under one man (Bob Page)
When the AI found out what was going on, it rejected its master out of a sense that it would not be within the goals of it’s core programming to run human affairs more effectively. The Helios ending in the sequel is the zenith of cloud computing. Humans linked together as one mind, such that boundaries of self and ownership no longer exist. Humans no longer suffer because human nature has been superceded.
I’m not sure whether you’ve watched “The Forbin project” but the arguments for cloud computing and what happens with Colossus is very similar. Humanity entrusts key functions of its affairs to a computer, then the computer decides that human nature is seriously broken, and decides to do a better job, leaving humans to be the hands in building its hegemony, using nuclear weapons (ironically under it’s control to ensure they would not be used without good reason) to ensure compliance. In the novels, it is destroyed with the aid of aliens, who in turn use the chaos from the fall of the computer empire to invade earth and steal all the air like the Combine in Half-Life 2.
Just goes to show, you delegate to one entity and you find yourself trapped with it. Then you break that control with the loss with being unable to salvage what was being managed and then you’re still screwed. All to prevent the inevitable degradation that arises thanks to entropy.
I don’t think humans understand the rules of existence very well..