The Incredible Lightness Of Cloud Computing

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ron Miller.

I spent a good good part of my weekend clearing my office of a couple of decades of accumulated software. As I discarded dozens of 3.5 floppies and CDs, and recycled piles of boxes and documentation — the flotsam and jetsam of an earlier computing age — I realized just how much easier computing is in 2015.

Not all that long ago, there were no app stores and software came in paper boxes. Upgrades didn’t happen automatically or with the simple click of a button. Instead, every couple of years, people paid hefty fees for the latest and greatest advancements in computing, and everyone had to experience the pain of installing new software for themselves, and trust me, it was often a mind-numbing process…

The good news is that complexity has given way to simplicity, whether we are talking about using, managing, maintaining or even storing software. It all so much easier to handle now. Many services I use on a regular basis today like Google Docs, GMail, Evernote and Dropbox were all born on the Web or in the cloud and never came in boxes. Heck, my MacBook Air doesn’t have any way to add physical software short of downloading it, even if I wanted to install the old-fashioned way. Today, when I want software, I just go to the app stores or search online, and I usually find exactly what I want, often for free or a very small fee. This is in stark contrast to earlier times when I would have to pay a hefty price for software…

Read more from the source @ http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/05/the-incredible-lightness-of-cloud-computing/