I think it's just a given at this point that something that's generally happening in computing is individual home users are ceding direct control of their home machines. Last week, I suggested that software vendors and computer makers have wanted to maintain control over endpoints for a while, or at the very least that they would definitely have taken it before if the technology were there. For years now, most large commercial software packages have, for example, been automatically installing software patches and self-submitting crash report information back to developers. This includes telemetry data that Microsoft has been sending back to itself since Windows XP was new in 2001, if not earlier than that.
In Windows 8 and 10, Microsoft presents users with an option to use a Microsoft Account to sign into the operating system. If you do this, some settings automatically get applied, accounts are automatically set up for the mail and calendar applications.
Microsoft tries very hard to get people to sign up for Office365 and Apple tries to get people to sign up for extra iCloud storage space. I think the next step for these companies' services is to integrate them more deeply into the operating system, in one of two ways:
The first is something I've been asking for for a long time. Apple did this in its early .Mac and follow-up online services. These services mounted your online storage (at the time, it was something like 100-500 megabytes or maybe one full gigabyte) as a disk. You could only use it when your system was online, and it looked very much like a normal file server, but your files were, of course, on Apple's servers.
This is in comparison with how OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, Box, et al currently operate, which is to create a sync folder inside your home directory. In different deployments of the idea, sometimes you get reference files that alias to their online versions, sometimes you get selective synchronization, and so on, but you usually end up wasting a lot of disk space anyway.
The second way I wish some of these services would work is by just moving toward synchronizing your entire home directory.
In my personal ideal world, Microsoft would sell a second service in addition to Office 365: Windows 365 would be a service that gets you an upgrade or clean installation of Windows 10 Professional on up to some number (five?) computers, perhaps access to some neat Azure services such as a Windows 10 remote desktop, and with an option to sync your entire home directory to OneDrive.
I imagine this service being available at a few different price points, possibly even being something piecemeal, and I actually wish that Microsoft would allow entire home drive syncing as an option even to Office365 customers whose home directories will not exceed 1TB anyway.
In an ideal world, both of these would combine to allow users to define where they want what data. For example, perhaps tax information and other archival information can go in a "mapped" drive kept purely on Microsoft's servers, while a photo library is selectively synced to a second physical disk on certain machines, and core productivity data and game saves are automatically synchronized to every computer.
The important part of my thinking is that as we migrate toward paying yearly for access to applications that we previously purchased only once, we may want to consider whether or not there's other functionality we might want to be asking for.
For example, if I'm paying somewhere between $70 and $200 yearly for Office (and possibly Windows) licenses, something I'd love to be able to do is use those tools through some method like RemoteApp or something similar. Ideally, you'd have the option to use the app via RemoteApp or via a fully-fledged Remote Desktop window, and you'd have access to all of your data in that area.
For Adobe's part, I also would like them to either move toward both allowing their applications to run in a RemoteApp type of environment, and allow more for the current price. Adobe, for example, offers a very small amount of online storage with Creative Cloud. The service costs enough, if this is something adobe thinks of as the future of their company, then it might be worth treating it like it is. Otherwise, it would be nice to be able to buy periodically updated perpetual versions of the Creative Suite products.
Alternately, of course, it would be great if somebody really took up the mantle of competing with Adobe on both Mac OS X and Windows.
Regardless of what Adobe is doing, I think there's a lot of potential in some additional consumer-focused product offerings form Microsoft, as far as cloud computing goes. I'm personally a very technical user, and I have the skill, patience, hardware, and budget to set up a backup structure for my server and various desktops. Most people just aren't, and I absolutely think the direction technology should move is, wherever possible, to cater to those who aren't. To the people who are going to save their priceless photographs and tax documents on the desktop of an eleven-year-old laptop or some form of netbook.
Unfortunately, it's this group that's going to be least likely to pay between $70 and $200/year for retail, consumer-focused Office365, or even Windows365 to install on an old computer. The trouble is that this group often can't afford any additional software or backups at all. It's this group that install OpenOffice on their systems either after Office365 expires or instead of using it all, because they haven't yet heard of LibreOffice and because the $70/year or $7/month is too much. Unfortunately, so is, often, the cost of an external hard disk or two for backup purposes.
Without, say, socializing Office subscriptions or adding them to Internet plans, there's no way that they'll get into the hands of people who I think could most use something like that.
This isn't at all to say that I think that other people won't be able to use this type of service. I can think of plenty of people I know who can afford it and for whom it makes sense, to avoid the need to purchase additional external hard disk drives or bother with backup software that often needs to be re-purchased yearly.
For comparison, I'm currently spending well over $200/year on the hardware and software to back up just a few of my computers. I'd say that each year I purchase at least one 3-4TB external hard disk at a cost of $100-130 each, and a few different copies of Acronis True Image, and for a while I had a $20 or so monthly Amazon Glacier bill.
There are other (easier) third party online backup tools, but I do feel this is something Microsoft could be offering on their own.
If I weren't running my home server out of personal interest, I'd probably be prime for some kind of deal on Windows and Office licensing, and online storage with features like OneDrive's, such as file history.
I very much like the idea of both saving the money on running and maintaining the server and its backup systems as well as the backup systems for all of my client computers, and hardware upgrades for both. That's another story entirely, but the important takeaway is that Microsoft could build a Chromebook-like experience using OneDrive, at any price or storage tier.
I think Apple might be missing out on something too. Apple's got another potential advantage in that it makes routers. Apple could do some DNS trickery on its Time Capsule routers to use them as file shares and Time Machine destinations that also synchronize to iCloud, in different storage increments.
Because Apple has an (expandable!) piece of on-premise hardware they can use as a front-end to the service, your ability to edit 4k video on an iPad Pro stored on your Time Machine as though it were coming from iCloud has the potential to be very interesting. In addition, Apple's out-of-the-box experience for setting up new machines could continue to be drastically simple, and downloading relevant data could become very quick. This would also protect against hardware failure in the Time Capsule, because if your disk died or your Time Capsule failed, you could buy a new one and then download your data directly into it.
In Apple's case, you're definitely looking at a premium product. The 2TB and 3TB Time Capsules are, respectively, $299 and $399 apiece, plus the cost of any necessary external hard disks, and the cost of iCloud storage quota, which is currently about $10/terabyte/month, so you're looking at $30 monthly if you have a 3-terabyte Time Capsule that you need or want to run at capacity.
Other nice things I imagine the Time Capsule doing is helping integrate with Apple's digital purchase ecosystem. It would be nice if, for example, it could download App Store updates (and iOS/Mac OS software updates) in advance for you, as well as purchases from iTunes, or possibly even act as a centralized iTunes media library, helpful for Macs with small solid state disks as local storage. This kind of arrangement might also be better for those using Apple TV or similar devices that prefer to stream form the Apple Store or from a Mac with a big hard disk.
The other thing this would do is make it a pretty good every-day experience to run an "iCloud is a file server" kind of arrangement. You could hypothetically do both syncing and direct connections, depending on which data set you were using, or choose which you're doing up front, for all of your data.
I think that there's a lot of possibility here. I can see Apple partnering with ISPs to help them set up Time Capsules (or perhaps similar devices, U-Verse branded gateways with Time Capsule hooks, as an example) and leasing the device as part of the service.
Some of this gets back into the disadvantages of getting into a situation where the vendor has as much control of your local machine. Doing most of what I've suggested is costly. Even most pretty well-off Mac users are probably going to have a tough time swallowing a $30/mo charge, even if that was bundled with a Time Capsule router to use, for 3TB of multi-purpose network based storage.
The other strategy in all of this is to go all the way for a computer that does almost nothing on its own, in the style of Windows netbooks that have no useful amount of local storage (where a remote desktop or RemoteApp session and/or a simple mapped network drive would be relevant), is to just use the web browser for everything.
Google's Chromebooks have this down pat. You buy a machine, sign into it, it takes a few minutes to apply your settings, and all relevant data is in web services, whether they're Google's or others. You can even use Office365 (free or paid) in Google Chrome, as well as beta versions of Apple's iWork productivity applications.
I suspect we're moving in that direction, and the question is how much Windows and Microsoft's services must change in the process. I worry that Microsoft wants more control of your local system, but doesn't necessarily want to give you any advantages in exchange for that control.
Google is sort of the wildcard here, because as Internet connections of all types (including the speed and reliability of home connections and the availability of connections in publically accessible places) then the case for a computer that can operate completely independently of the Internet is going to have less value. In addition, for as much as people are worried about privacy when it comes to Microsoft, they appear not to care at all about the contents of their Gmail and Google Docs/Drive/Photos accounts – which contain actual personally-identifying-information that Google uses "in aggregate" to help third parties advertise to you. Even with that knowledge, people love Gmail, Docs, Drive, et al.
If Microsoft can successfully create a hybrid environment or make a compelling case for Windows and OneDrive as a combination for true online operation, then I think they may be in decent shape, but that's a transition that has yet to happen. There's no really good way to use the contents of a OneDrive directly online, and we haven't yet reached the point where a Microsoft or Apple customer can sign into their new computer and start working immediately. I think that should be the end-game.