Brendan wrote:
It really does depend on the type/s of application/s, and how they're implemented. For something like a word-processor, if almost everything is done locally (e.g. editing, layout, rendering, spell checking, etc) and the cloud is only used for storage it wouldn't be too bad, and if everything is done remotely (e.g. it's using a protocol like
VNC and all the processing is done remotely) then it would be extremely bad (e.g. > 200 ms of lag between pressing a key and seeing it on screen).
You are expecting that everything will be shifted to a cloud and it is your mistake. The economy of scale is applicable to situations when more than one user uses the same infrastructure without redundancy, but if users use their PCs as terminals and shift all work to a cloud, then we see a great redundancy right where the user is, user's PC is underused while cloud's servers are overused. Such a skewed picture is, of course, not very efficient.
But if we remember the origins of the "cloud talk", then it is about a tablets that are replacing PCs. May be the word "tablet" is the cause of your mistake and you think that if an enterprise will be using tablets then it just must shift all possible processing to a cloud. But it is wrong expectation. Because, of course, the processing power of a tablet should be used just as processing power of PC is used today. Tablet's power is more than enough for such applications as text editing, so there is no need for cloud for such task. But there is a need for cloud for an enterprise that wants to catch the economy of scale. And the economy is achieved without offloading word processor tasks to the cloud, but it is a result of sharing the same infrastructure among many enterprises with redundancy liquidation. For example, if there are 10 enterprises that use 10 servers each and that hire 10 administrators each, we can imagine a centralized provider of services with 60 servers and 20 administrators with the same throughput that is required by 10 enterprises. So, here we have the economy of scale in form of 40 extra servers and 80 extra administrators. And service provider here never was expected to do any job of a text processor or whatever desktop application you have thoughts of. But the provider just does the same job as combined 100 servers and 100 administrators have done before.
And next, if an enterprise recognizes the need for speech recognition, then it sees it's benefits and can calculate the $ value of the technology application to the enterprise's particular conditions. Now an enterprise have a choice - to spend money on some dedicated recognition server(s) or pay service fee for a recognition service of a cloud provider. Because the economy of scale works as expected, the cost of managing additional dedicated server will be greater than the cost of managing servers for 10 enterprises, divided by 10. So, from the cost perspective it is obviously more efficient to use the cloud provided service instead of buying a dedicated serve(s).