We've learned to live with centralized water and electricity and banking, all outside of our control, rather than rely on on-premises solutions. SaaS, too, will win out after a few hiccups.
I get that cloud storage people think of themselves as the utility providers of the future, after all it makes instinctive sense to want to own something which consumers will spend their whole lives on. I've been in meetings where SaaS people gave presentations saying stuff like "...and in the near future the average person will spend 60% of their total income on cloud services; let's make that future happen!"
The difference is of course that after a power outage or after changing your utility providers, everything is back to normal - but after a little "cloud accident", all your stuff is simply gone. Worse, suppose in that glorious cloud future a person might end up in a situation where they can't make those substantial payments to their cloud providers for a time. All their stuff will be gone, as well. It turns out, we're being re-educated to accept a world where everything is just rented, not only including the stuff we "bought", but also the right to keep our very own creative output. Let the severity of that sink in for a minute.
We're drifting into a setting where basic properties of our digital lives are taken and then rented back to us at a horrendous markup.
It makes sense for the utilities to be centralized generating electricity for every house separately is inefficient and has only become recently viable with solar panels. Where possible people tend to switch to that for independence or a combination of both.
Getting water to every house in a city is impossible without it being centralized.
SAAS on the other hand is not necessary. We can do the same thing without requiring constant connectivity or by building and app that requires connectivity only when absolutely necessary for it to work.
However we can't ask for rent if it's not a service. I for one avoid all SAAS like the plague.
I don't mind one time payments hey if i get enough value from the product I wouldn't mind the option of donating extra however monthly payments make me look twice at how much value I'm getting or if i can get it from a product that requires a one time payment instead.
There should be some sort of process for this, akin to safety deposit boxes. Image the machines to tape, store for a year or two. You may need to work in something to ensure you don't turn into long-term data storage (maybe only offer the download once, or add in a 30 day "thaw from storage" buffer, or maybe a fixed fee to retrieve that data).
This is exactly what creeps me the hell out about these subscription plans, and I don't see it discussed enough.
And I don't need banking 24/7 to do my job. I don't need water 24/7 to live, especially if an outage is made public in advance. I am (too) dependent on electricity -- but there are alternatives if I need them (eg: rent/buy a generator and gasoline -- probably not viable in a massive blackout, though. At any rate it is certainly easy to plan for (and not too expensive)).
So most of these fall squarely in the "viable alternative" or not-essential (24/7) category.
That's just propaganda. I'm sure there's places where water and electricity are under government control and it still sucks, and i bet there's places where they aren't and everything works great.
It weakens the rest of your argument.
Utilities and telcos are a weird industry, with issues of natural monopolies and last-mile issues. I don't know what the right way to handle them is, but the case against government intervention is much weaker.
Yes, you can usually pick your own retailer for you utilities. But you cannot pick the distributor (downstream of the retailer, owns cables or pipes in your street) or transmission (upstream of the retailer, owns the cables or pipes providing your city).
The sales/distribution company usually doesn't own anything, they are just sales and marketing office. Everything is physically provided by companies, that you cannot choose.
With non-power utilities, even this isn't an issue - water or gas are never randomly shut off without warning.
[1] There is a small deficit of generation capacity under some conditions, primarily due to recent underinvestment in nuclear energy, so power is purchased from France routinely, who have a large surplus due to their much stronger generation infrastructure, but even if this became unavailable, the capacity is enough to prevent US-style grid failures.
Browsing offline maps is a breath of fresh air, it's so much quicker. Obviously you wouldn't download the whole world, only your home city or whatever. But it's lightning fast to zoom and pan around an offline map compared with connecting over mobile bandwidth.
Browsing maps in Airplane mode should be possible. It's a map after all, not a website.
Here's a great tool for getting a feel:
http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox...
Z=18 is rarely used, so for Z<=17 you're looking at roughly 300MB for raster tiles a city the size of Calgary. You also don't get routing information with purely raster data.
You could try vector data which would be smaller, but then you have to display it, which can be computationally expensive if you want it to look pretty, and you'd lose the snappiness you're seeking.
Actually, you could fit the entirety of the state of Washington in <50% of my phone's storage.
I'm not seeing a problem.
Well, most people don't want to lose even 20% of their phone's storage in a single app, much less 50%.
And that's just for those satisfied to only have info for one state. What about people regularly travelling between 1-2 states?
That said, I question the OP storage math. At least with vector information, I know that something like Navigon's GPS/map app, can store the whole of US (including the smallest of towns and cities) in around 1GB.
If you're traveling regularly between two states, you'd want your origin city, destination city, and your route with maybe a couple miles on either side. Say a 250-mile route, and 200 square miles at either end. I bet it fits in <2GB.
There is an option "Save map to use offline". Alas, it has an expiry period of 30 days.
I'd wager that Nokia provides equal, if not - arguably - better quality than Google maps and I don't need to incur insane roaming charges when using a map abroad.
Granted, there are a few functions, that require a net connection, but basic map functionality and navigation works very well without being on-line.
Maps are only one example. I can't think of many applications, which I would prefer as a "cloud" based service as opposed to native.
SAAS is inferior in:
* games
* text editors
* photo editors
* IDEs
Backup storage is okay, but I live in a country with tight bandwidth caps so I can't really use things, plus I don't want Google or Dropbox or MeGa snooping at what I upload.
So I would never pay to use any of the above things, and I would certainly NEVER pay Adobe for anything. I'm fortunate that I don't need to use their products.
> * games
Isn't steam like this? The bits get downloaded to your machine, but if Steam goes offline your SOL.
What steam could use is better download management. If they moved over to an on-demand streaming architecture it'd be really huge. The days you'd need to preload software could be over. This sort of thing has been solved many times before, so it's technically possible. In fact, as I type this I wonder why they haven't done it already.
It does have an "offline mode" where it will pre-decrypt the games or whatever it does behind the scenes.
Why would on-demand streaming be a good thing? Now you have to worry about ISPs and bandwidth, it doesn't solve the problem.
I need to worry about ISPs and bandwidth before, it's just that now I can be more frivolous with what I have installed on my machine (no sense leaving something installed "just in case").
Funny you mention Mappoint. It's exactly what I use when I'm navigating for my wife on trips. It works fine in areas with poor wireless data coverage. (We supplement with Waze to get traffic reports, but "self-hosted" Mappoint guarantees we won't lose map coverage because of radio issues.)
Not necessarily true. I'd argue that banking is much less centralized (clearing behind the various banks you might choose from is, of course, but in the meanwhile I can get most of what I need done if their independent system is up), and I grew up on a property at the edge of my town of ~50K with only electricity and phone as centralized services. We were on our own for everything else, water from a well, sewage treatment with a septic tank, heating from a big propane tank, which can be filled by various vendors, although the systems behind them are centralized, but there's plenty of reserves so that short term outages aren't an issue, we even burned our trash....
A lot of us believe in having a greater degree of self-reliance, e.g. I do backups to disk and LTO tape (some tapes of which live in a safe deposit box), and use rsync.net, a very low level SaaS provider for further redundancy.
I'd never allow my livelihood to depend on 24x7 external services except for electricity (no electricity == no modern civilization, which would eventually kill me for medical reasons).