Sorry, that doesn't wash. Japan used to have a reputation for cheap and crappy products, now they are world leaders in high quality and engineering. Its not that hard to change a brand, just make better stuff.

I think quite a lot of European citizens might well disagree with you here. This really isn't the USA.

And rightly so, there's enough permed hairy pr0n on the internet as it is.

It really brings home an appreciation for the human race. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about environmental damage we really are the only chance for earth based biodiversity to survive.

Where are these dumb terminals? Off the shelf PCs are standard in businesses everywhere; swapping them out might not be practical for a large organisation as they might not have enough spares on hand for more than a few failures. That happened a few times back in Nortel.

Even the basic premise doesn't stand up to a cursory glance. In order to use cloud computing people are going to need computers, which are going to need er, support. Doesn't matter what they are being used for, its the same machines.

www.startram.com

Talk about +1 appropriate.

Where mobile devices like phones and tablets shine is during a commute on a train or bus. How true it is I don't know, but I heard that in Japan many people just don't have a home computer or laptop, since they spend so much time commuting. In most western countries driving is a lot more common, to and from work and home, both of which have more useful machines available.

This is of course the weakness of mass consumer cloud adoption - if you have a machine capable of doing useful work, you already have a machine capable of beating the cloud hands down in every way without the ongoing cost and risk of an internet connection. For sharing large files, collaborative work, desktop publishing (blogs, flickr accounts, youtube), smallish offsite backups, the cloud works great, but even then you need local copies.

Likewise phones. Even what I would call the baseline in computing tasks, word processing (typing words and seeing them appear on screen) is basically impossible on a phone.

Agreed. Cloud based systems are a cachet that finds itself most useful for people who are highly mobile, even a low range laptop or netbook these days has vastly more computing power than is needed to operate every application most people might need. Data storage on USB drives and other mini systems are also well capable of absorbing a lot more data than most people produce. I mean any computer capable of playing a modern computer game can do almost any other task with ease, and cloud computing isn't useful for most of those other tasks.

The "cloud" is being heavily promoted for a variety of fairly obvious reasons, but to me its a solution looking for a problem, with as much value as thin client systems have.