The Cloud's False Promise to Coffee Shops The recent announcement of Dell's XPS Googlebook may have raised eyebrows among tech enthusiasts, but for those who've been paying attention to the trends in the industry, it's more than just a rehashing of old ideas.
It's a relic of a bygone era, when Google executives like Sundar Pichai touted the cloud as the future of computing. In 2010, Pichai predicted that laptops would soon become redundant.
The only thing you'd need on your computer was a web browser – all your apps, data, and connections would live in the cloud, rendering storage and fancy hardware obsolete.