Office in the Cloud?

So just envision this:

Server has installed on it software which allows people to balance budgets, make presentations, design products, write documents and it's not on their PCs.

Cool right?

And you made sure that everyone not only had the ability to use it, but had their own logins and space to store their data once created so everyone can share the files.

Cool right?

Who am I describing? Google? Microsoft's new office in the sky?

Nope.

It actually is how we used to work in the early 90's.

123 ran on a file server, as did Approach, Wordperfect, Visio and many others, even Lotus Notes and some still run it this way.

So 15-20 years later we have gone full circle.

Funny thing happened on the way to the Cloud.

We've been there and done that, and people hated it.

Of course now we have more bandwidth.

And why did we stop working the old way? Because PCs got stronger and could handle it all to be stored locally. Now we have excellent PCs which really just need to run a browser, the dumb terminal of this millennium. No I didn't mean just you, my S10e but all the netbooks.

The upside this time is software in the Cloud should be faster, simpler, easier to work with hopefully than the PC versions.

Either way, we may be moving forward, but in some ways we are moving backwards.