Larry Ellison and certain other control freaks would love to see the day. Total control of your desktop; when they read Orwell's 1984, they were rooting for Big Brother. Former attempts include the various attempts to sell the market on various 'thin clients' that attached to the servers. When I put on my IT hat, I can sympathize with the benefits of controlling those desktops so stupid users don't damage the data, crash their PC's, introduce conficker via their flash drives, etc. etc. As an information collector/broker, and sometimes security consultant - I think you must be out of your mind to 'trust' a server farm's underpaid personnel with your data. Yes, you 'could' implement your own 'in house cloud' and many enterprises are already doing that to one degree or another. The cash register at the fast food restaurant is an example. However - my personal data? You can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. (to borrow a slogan from the NRA). Once you decide you don't want to share your data with a surprisingly large number of individuals who are purportedly trustworthy according to other people who offer smiling assurances about how carefully they screen their employees? At that point, the benefits of cloud and software as a service drop considerably. The data storage as a service makes a LOT more economic sense than software as a service. The data is everything. The software - it some ways, it doesn't matter whether it is downloaded (assuming an ultra-reliable, 24/7 available source)or locally installed. On the other hand, downloading and running the software as a run time event, where you don't install the software locally - makes updates easier, and provides a way to charge by the hour of use, control of licenses, that's the benefits. Otherwise, you are wasting bandwidth by having to haul that software over and over and over. Once again, it's all about control, who has it and who wants it? I like locally installed software and local data - I have control of my stuff, you have control of your stuff. That's the way *I LIKE IT*. YMMV