I think Microsoft and Apple have both finally started to create a picture of cloud computing that is really promising.
By integrating their desktop products with their cloud services, they’re making anybody’s data who takes advantage of these services safe and universally available (with a network connection), without forcing us to abandon more functional desktop applications (as Google would have us do). Neither are they forcing us to abandon the ability to keep a local copy in whatever format or way we wish, and providing us with the ability to opt-out of these services for individual documents.
Of course, the usual caveat exists: these products are not open for anyone to develop around, and so anyone who wishes to use them gets locked into a particular set of applications 
Fix this, and I’d be really interested, I think.
Right… back to my essay.
One Comment
An additional caveat is to be careful of sending out information online. Although you still have the ability to keep an offline copy the remote copy is still stored on someone else’s computer and you should be careful to keep your privacy when using these systems.
Make sure you know how to configure your Cloud computing system of choice before putting up information you wouldn’t be happy to see on your public YouTube or Facebook profile. It’s possible to accidentally configure documents to be very public in a way that you may not want, if you don’t know what the settings do you may open yourself to unfortunate lapses of privacy.
Particularly sensitive information shouldn’t be put out online and if you insist on doing that consider using encryption to protect it from uninvited readers, it’s paranoid but that doesn’t mean that you should rely on your Google or Amazon or Microsoft or Apple password to keep financial data or (as an example you should just leave on a sheet of paper in a lock file cabinet) social security numbers safe. It’s only as well protected as your password quality and the care the company storing it for you takes protecting it.