[simonh]

I agree it looks like Apple is the only mobile vendor who's business seems to align well with a vision like this. They're already taking steps in that direction, which are hard for rivals to take because this approach closes off revenue opportunities for them.

Every now and then I see a suggestion we should move towards federated services and mesh networks because it would give people more control and freedom, but the cost of that is complexity. It's like the classic reply on HN when Dropbox was announced, along the lines of why would anyone ever want this when they can 'just' run rsync against an SVN repository?

Any solution that expects average users to become sysadmins is DOA. It was true when people were pushing for it in the 90s and it's still true now.