Thoughtful post here.  I responded to it.

Security continues to be a question I believe that stops most people from adopting a cloud only workflow. There isn’t any technical reason that people need for a desktop anymore. Performance? You can have plenty of that with caching and proper programming design.

Don’t you think that the rise of virtualization such as Citrix and remote desktop solutions has shown that people are taking baby steps toward trusting the cloud? I am not sure if this is a helpful or unhelpful thing. I personally have my data in both the cloud and locally. Yes there is always the lack of privacy, but honestly storing locally isn’t that private either. Ask anyone who has had a home invasion.

Open source is great from a cost standpoint of course, but the real challenge is that people have an ease of use and comfortable feeling with technology. I can’t see data being stored in the cloud safely until some kind of PKI or biometric infrastructure is developed and tested and has gone years without being cracked. Then I think the days of local computing are numbered.