Doc Searles writes:

There are dozens of wi-fi hot spots showing up on our lists, but all of them are closed. If this were eight years ago, at least half of them would be open, but the popular default in the world is now for closed hot spots, so those are also not options.

I’m sure in the long run The Market will fix this, but meanwhile “The Cloud’s” promise and reality are way out of sync. Since most of The Market outside our homes is comprised of pay services over wi-fi and cellular data systems are sure to suffer traffic jams as more of our lives require tethering to data banks and services in clouds, I’m not holding my breath for ease in the short run.

Remember “the information superhighway”? Would be nice to have that now.

I’ve written here and there about why I am skeptical of cloud computing. Namely, for cloud computing to really work, we have to be able to reliably access the Internet, and have a solid connection, wherever we go. And it needs to be free or a part of a ubiquitous subscription service. As long as we have to ask ourselves whether it’s worth it to get a solid and stable Internet connection in some place or another, cloud computing won’t work. Because the alternative is installed software. And you know what? That’s on my computer wherever I go. A file locker that can be accessed anywhere would be helpful, but even then it’s going to have to be a synchonization thing rather than a working on it from wherever thing. I open it and download it to the laptop, and as soon as I’m done with it, or the first time I am connected to the Internet again after it’s done, it uploads to the central server in North Carolina or wherever.

I am the first person that should be using cloud computing. I have an obscene number of computers and laptops. It’s a real pain to know that a file exists somewhere and then have to figure out which of the four likely places it is. But I will take that, every time, over being able to work on something only until the Internet connection slows to a crawl or stops.

This isn’t an appeal for some large government program that will assure Internet access anywhere and everywhere. Rather, it’s saying that unless we have such a program (whether supplied by the market or the government), it’s going to make more sense to work on files locally rather than remotely.

-{via Dustbury}-