I mean, imagine a future where every computer is just a chromebook, phones are no longer phones but just a “terminal” that streams the actual OS which runs in the cloud.
I mean, with 5G, I think its possible to make it seamless. And I think corporations push for this because they would love to have your data in the cloud, both for surveillance, and to charge a subscription for storage. I think this enshittifications would eventually happen to digital storage.
“You would own nothing and you’d be happy”
So how likely will this dystopian future happen?
I’d predict a 90% chance of this happening, and almost everyone would be okay at first, until they start overcharging for cloud storage subscriptions, but by then it’d be too late, there’d be a monopoly.
It’s already happening. Microsoft’s push to onedrive and m365 was to get everyone off of legacy apps.
Next will be ARM devices that have a multi-day battery because it’s all just cached apps accessing your cloud-saved data.
AFAIAC, all that that achieved was to push me off of those MS products.
I’m split. Outlook and other apps have turned into pigs but have very little competition to force innovation. Customers are just as complacent, and demand things not change at all.
Moving to PWA web apps has turned the industry around. MS is dumping all of the old code that causes so many issues.
I find other IT people expecting MS to not make even small changes, while also complaining about battery life and app reliability.
I’m looking forward to New Outlook. Supporting HTML and https is so much easier than map I and legacy client code with dirty plugins.