Let me ask another question: Will it become feasible to move code, tools and everything else into web services? Imagine you have your favorite editor (emacs, TM, vim) running in a browser window. Only that it’s live-updating like, e.g., Ethercodes or Wave. And you have very straight-forward access to SCM features like staging hunks of code. Also the code deploys straight to heroku or whatever. It could, of course, also go through closure or sproutcore in case of a fancy js client app.
Do you think it’ll all evaporate (I refuse to say cloud :) eventually?
The thing is I’m really going through a lot of pain setting up my system and other’s systems over and over again. Yes, there are ways to automate that but the effort is too high for most or we would all be doing it right now.