Those who depend significantly on “the cloud” will find themselves sitting around wondering “WTF?” when hackers begin targeting “the cloud.”
In my opinion, “the cloud” is an idea to extend the control of the platform to a few big players in computing.
It is about compensating for their inability to significantly improve software to justify the high price. It is especially noticeable due to the Open Source apps first for Linux and now ported for Windows. For the average user there is no longer a need to purchase an upgraded office suite each time they change computers.
Some of the Open Source apps have functionality that the best close source does not. Example: regex find/replace in a spreadsheet. Gnumeric does that and it is ported for Windows and is free. (there are some things that Excel will do that Gnumeric will not)