But there is no reason we couldn't do that with a basic home or small office network, adding basic VPN functionality to allow remote access if necessary. It's not particularly difficult to set these things up today for anyone who can set up a broadband router and home wireless network. If they were the must-have technologies being promoted instead of the cloud then it would get even easier, as the people making the equipment built more user-friendly interfaces that didn't need much in the way of technical skills at all, and as ready-made server software to co-ordinate your mail or calendar or music collection or whatever became as simple as a one-click download.

My contacts? Not vital at all. My presentations? Not vital at all. My music? Not vital at all.

Somehow I suspect you'd disagree if all your contacts started getting phishing e-mails that looked like they came from you, or if you blew a million-dollar business deal because your presentation wasn't available when you visited a prospective client, or if you had thousands of dollars' worth of music that you'd spent real money on and it disappeared overnight because the service provider closed down the system or you didn't realise you couldn't transfer something between accounts or you sync'd the wrong thing the wrong way. Things like these can and do happen, but I think there's a perception of "It'll never happen to me".

Because when I figure in my time needed to configure and maintain this decent, cheap and local storage it is not that cheap anymore.

I guess you're looking at this from a personal point of view. I'm not sure it's really true even then, but I acknowledge that setting up and maintaining IT systems today does require technical skills that most home users don't have, and if your new tablet or laptop or smartphone ships with the vendor's pet cloud services already integrated then of course that's an easier user experience since it just works (as long as you're happy to use those services and don't want any others).

I don't really buy that argument at all for businesses, though. Usually there are all kinds of gotchas if you're doing serious work in the cloud. Just look at the string of pathetic excuses and weasel words every time Amazon's services go down about how you should have used redundant something-or-other and different availability-wotsits, and then look at how many businesses either hadn't understood this or hadn't wanted to spend the extra money or simply hadn't done it yet and wound up offline as a result. I defy anyone to claim that the time and money to configure cloud services to be reliable per all these recommendations is harder than setting up equivalent equipment on-site or with dedicated hosting and a decent off-site backup system, assuming that you have someone who knows what they are doing in each case to do the work.