Not sure that that is the correct distinction. When I posted the original submission, the distinction I was specifically talking about was applicationsthat run as distinct pieces of software, and applications that run completely in the web browser.

Also, Harvard isn't the only educational institution with 11 figure endowments.

Apple is currently the richest organization in the world. They have more cash on hand than the US treasury, and their net income exceeds even the most profligate budget they could come up with.

Well, there's this company called Google. They've got this thing called Google Docs. No idea what it does though.

Office 365. Basecamp. Evernote. Dropbox/GDrive/OneDrive. Trello. Prezi.

Where are you living, dude? In the middle of the Congo?

Even an autonomous car that was limited to ONLY driving at slow pace rush hour freeway driving would be a huge boon to automotive life.

Unless the driver is Spock, in which case the scissors bend.

Tell that to Harvard.

You mean like this guy?

Original submitter here. I sincerely do NOT want to live in a web-only world.

The fact that this question gets asked basically every year should more than sufficiently answer the question.

True, that the question gets asked every year. But that, in and of itself doesn't disprove the existence of a trend which does not show any sign of slowing.

Oh, bullshit. Millions of people in developed nations (particularly the U.S.) have "broadband" that is a few hundred Kbps, or a couple of Mbps--let's just call it 3 orders of magnitude, or more, slower than a spinning disk.

True, but that doesn't change the fact that the companies behind these products would prefer lower functionality but ongoing consistent revenue over higher functionality but lower "lumpy" revenue. I'm the original submitter, and I have no desire to live in a world where we subscribe to everything we use rather than buy it. However, I find the trend alarming, and I don't see any hard limits that well resourced companies with an agenda and incentive couldn't get around.

Looking at the trends of today, however, the vast majority of people seem only too willing to serve up their privacy on a silver platter. Are there enough people who care about privacy to create an ecosystem around, or will we have a divide between the functional, privacy free, mainstream technology world, and the dusty poorly maintained, undermanned and underfunded world where a few diehards cling to ideals that have long since been abandoned?

Perhaps you could have a two tier level of trust where repositories that are from signed approved vendors are automatically permitted, but unlisted ones require specific admin permission to install from. Of course, power users could mark an unlisted certificate as trustworthy to prevent the auth request, but it would prevent installs from silently coming in from hijacked repositories in the scenario described above.

Is that really what they are doing? I have a counterfeit Prolific device that "broke" after a driver update. I simply uninstalled the new drivers and installed an old version to make it work.

Admittedly, that's a different OEM, so they may be doing something different.

None of these analogies are correct.

They are not changing the device at all, they are simply making their drivers not work with the fake ones.

There is no reasonable analogy that can be made involving a Gucci product.