Google creating a #fail?

Google may be right, to some degree at least, about the "torture" of Windows-based computing.

But, I'm with Computerworld's thoughts: a "locked" (as in locked like an iPhone is locked), cloud-based laptop ain't the answer.

The website notes that (as "jailbroken" iPhones show) people want control over their Internet devices. It also notes Chrome as a browser still falls short of Firefox in some ways. Finally, the website also notes, cloud-based computing WILL have various issues in the future, though it doesn't specifically talk about security breaches.

The Internet itself can't be trusted to handle 100% of our computing needs.

Google's own Blogger service went down for more than 24 hours this week. To restore service, Google rolled back to an older, backed-up version, which didn't include 30 hours of blog posts for Google's millions of users. As I was writing this column, Google was working to restore the lost posts.

Such disruptions happen all the time, even for cloud-based services that are supposed to be bulletproof. Amazon's EC2 website hosting service -- which exists to provide fail-safe, totally reliable hosting -- experiences catastrophic outages. The most recent outage occurred in April. The glitch took down Foursquare, Reddit, Quora and other major services. It took Amazon four days -- four days! -- to return service to normal.

The final question is, what if Google bails on this?

Thanks, Big Bad G, but I'll pass.

Cloud computing is great, but only in combination with "regular" computing. The only reliable way to manage data is to store and back up locally, and also to the cloud.