Oh please: we don't play along blissfully ignoring that. Arguably the biggest contribution to information theory is Shannon's source coding theorem, and we haven't forgotten it.
For day-to-day work, the redundancy & reliability of something Google Docs is much greater than a client computer. RAID is expensive. Backplanes fail. Laptops fall. But now instead of waiting 2-4 hours for a reimage & file transfer, I can take a base image, go to docs.google.com, and be up and running in the time it takes to walk a laptop to my office. Or, if more pressing: in the time it takes to log in at my coworker's machine.
>For day-to-day work, the redundancy & reliability of something Google Docs is much greater than a client computer.
Of google docs, yes. Of always having a network connection to docs, no. Maybe its just the environments I've been in, but at every client, employer, or place I've visited, my devices were more reliable than the network connection. Hell, last year the level 3 uplink for most of my state was out for a day.
In both cases you need a working computer to edit a file, but only one of them also requires a network connection. The only advantages you have are that software deploys faster because you're using a 21-centurly terminal emulator and the file under work is stored on the network.
Just because we as developers haven't put the solutions to quick and easy deployment of software packages and file redundancy into the hands of users doesn't make the cloud a panacea. We have these tools for us already. If my desktop fails, my latest-version files were on its hard drive, the network drive and usb flash drive, all synced after every save. I can grab a laptop or my co-workers machine and in the time it takes me to plug in a flash drive or just hit up a lan repository I'll have the files as they were at time of failure. If the other computer doesn't have the software, if I could hit up google docs on the other machine, I can easily smack 1 command into the terminal and in 30 seconds be ready to roll (and that server could be local, too, not relying on internet uplink). I'm not against relying on the network at all, but doing so in a manner that doesn't demand an always-on connection to get work done.
A solution that relies on the availability of network OR local machine and can gracefully handle the fault of one or the other is orders of magnitude more reliable than a solution that relies on BOTH network and local machine.
That just means that if you already had Google Docs open, you'll be able to keep typing away and it'll commit the changes when it gets a network connection again. It doesn't mean you can access your Google Docs (i.e. open up Chrome and type "docs.google.com" and expect anything to happen) without a network connection.
I just turned off my Wi-Fi and typed "docs.google.com" into the address bar — Chrome says it can't find the site. So I, at least, can't. Based on the Google blog post about offline Google docs, it looks like it's a lot more complicated than that.
You have to turn it on. When online and in Docs, click on the gear thingy in the top-right. There should have been an intro/help pop-up when you logged in after they rolled out the feature, did for me.
For day-to-day work, the redundancy & reliability of something Google Docs is much greater than a client computer. RAID is expensive. Backplanes fail. Laptops fall. But now instead of waiting 2-4 hours for a reimage & file transfer, I can take a base image, go to docs.google.com, and be up and running in the time it takes to walk a laptop to my office. Or, if more pressing: in the time it takes to log in at my coworker's machine.
So I'm curious: what's with the pseudo-FUD?