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My mother-in-law just recently decided it was time for her to get a new computer. When she asked me to help her find one five years ago, I spent a while researching processor speeds, hard disk capacity and tried to help her find the best bang for her buck.
This time? We went to our local big-box electronic store and test drive the keyboards and monitors on a few. When we found one with a nice easy to read screen and a keyboard she liked, that’s what we bought. I honestly can’t remember the brand, size of the hard drive or the speed of the processor, because it doesn’t matter!
She doesn’t do anything on her computer anymore. Everything she does is on line.
Her email is a hosted service. There are a few other friends she communicates with via social networking or gaming sites. Bills get paid on line, and even the occasional letter she needs to write can all be done with on line tools. It’s to the point that the only software that I’ve got installed on her computer are the browser, an anti virus scanner, and the latest versions of Flash and Silverlight.
Looking at my own PC, there is a lot of software that doesn’t get opened much any more. My business and personal email addresses are both on hosted services. My customer database, accounting packages, and banking all reside in the cloud. A service backs up my PC to the cloud, and I can now access everything on it from my smart phone.
Everything I do hasn’t moved to the cloud yet. I still haven’t been able to get away from having a local word processor and spreadsheet on my computer. I program, which while can be done on line, is a lot more convenient with a local text editor and IDE.
