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Comment by ama729 | Hacker News Reader

  > I'm as big a believer in the transformational power of cloud computing
  > as anyone you'll meet. Smartphones, which are constantly seeking and
  > retrieving data, don't make sense without the cloud, and any business
  > that isn't racing to push its data and software into someone else's data
  > center is, in my view, setting itself up for disruption by a competitor
  > who is.

- A smartphone is useful even without internet.

- My local restaurant wont get disrupted because it's not using Cloudfront.

At first I though it was a parody (Seriously, "the fog"?), well apparently I wasn't wrong...

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> "A smartphone is useful even without internet."

In principle, I agree but that's not the way things are going. How many apps do you have that have to talk to (someone else's) backend service to be at all useful? For me I can think of Google Maps, Citymapper, Whatsapp and the weather app (just off the top of my head). All these are useless to me without a data connection.

Notes taking, GPS, music, to-do lists, calls(!), etc.

To me it's especially the "don't make sense without the cloud" bit that I find egregious.

Music, many games.

I didn't specify phone calls because you don't need a smartphone for that (just a phone). I'm not sure you need a smartphone for GPS either, but I don't actually know.

I'm trying to argue that we're heading toward a system where services that we use daily don't function well without some form of data connection, even if that's only for the purpose of synchronisation (e.g. your notes being available when you get to your tablet/laptop). I agree that smartphones can work perfectly well without the internet but that's not quite the way we use them now.

We might think we'd be fine offline but try turning the wifi and data off on your smartphone and see how frustrating you find it.

Your notes should use the cloud to persist, or they will disappear when the devices are out of work.

Where did you get music? Scrape from CD?

As for GPS and calls, their infrastructures are also part of the Cloud.

GPS is part of the cloud? Seriously?

>My local restaurant wont get disrupted because it's not using Cloudfront.

To put it out there, I was in an unfamiliar city this weekend and when my friends and I wanted to order some food, simply for convenience: if they weren't on grubhub they were off our radar; so I'd say "the cloud" is even offering a competitive advantage for your local restaurants that use it vs those that don't.

Before the term cloud we still had websites ... the cloud term is a little foggy if you ask me.

Before "the cloud" we had a lot of awful flash restaurant websites done by a local contractor with wildly varying quality, functionality, and no ability to order online. I'd say the "the cloud" (the pop-culture and general understanding of it, not specific things like Cloudfront) really has improved this area.

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