[codexon]

Desktop software will be irrelevant shortly

Desktop software will never become irrelevant.

I will continue to choose MS Word for the foreseeable future because the documents are on my machine, and not on the web where it is vulnerable to MITM attacks or the whim of Google employees and government agencies.

[rbanffy]

Never confuse "never" with "foreseeable future". I, too, won't give up my hard drive for cloud storage for the foreseeable future. But I already did that for e-mail and do a lot of collaboration through Google Documents. All the source code I write is versioned on private servers that could, conceivably, be called a "private cloud", albeit a very small one.

And, BTW, by being on your machine, they may not be vulnerable to government agencies (unless you cross a border) and Google employees, but, as was shown a couple weeks back, it's vulnerable to borked anti-virus updates.

Not to say the viruses themselves.