> During a hurricane when your power is off a week, "could based" might as well be "pie in the sky" when you don't have web access. I can still run a computer on battery. Have you noticed that the industry doesn't address issues such as this or am I the only one that is noticing that? And it's just not hurricane's, it could be war/attacks and a lot of things as well.

> I still have clients who live in communities that only have dialup. Lot's of issues still out there that make us a long way from being cloud friendly. Some can't even get Sat web access if they wanted to due to the side of the mountain/forest they are on.

It's presumed that their needs were provided for by the older generation of software. Them being the minority and thus not too important in the balance sheets, they may as well not exist. Likewise for the emergency needs - you don't want to mention such things in your advertising campaign, it may just send out the wrong message, psychologically.

But then you notice that things just stop working here and there. This service can't connect to that, because that is running on a newer protocol; you can't buy this because it's no longer supported; whatever may still work for you is out of production, out of support, out in the wild.

Sure, you can run XP indefinitely. I've even met a W2000 workstation this week. But as soon as you want some obsolete version of Windowses to cooperate with a newer one, you're doomed. For instance, I just gave up on printer sharing. The printer is hooked to a W7 Ultimate machine, and there's a couple of laptops running XP. The best way (actually the only one that is sure to work!) is to, well, use the portability of the laptop and just bring it close enough to the printer, plug the printer into the laptop directly and print. As to who can see which share on which machine... I couldn't even write a book about it, because I can't remember the ever-changing landscape. It's never the same, it's as if that guy Schrödinger let his cat in.

So if it's all in the cloud, nothing on the desktop real soon now... I just hope to retire by that time and finally get rid of all things Microsoft. For now, I'm with it just because of Fox.