You can now view PDFs in Google Docs without the need for any desktop application other than a web browser. And it works and its fast.
I think this is truly awesome and is just a taste of what is to come. Computers of the future will simply be “Internet Thin Clients” and everything from apps to files will be accessed online. With all our data in the “cloud”, this could see the death of personal storage for smallish files, so I have to ask…
Would you trust “the Internet” with all your data?
I expect that I’ll always want most of my data to be where I am. Mostly because internet access will never be as fast/cheap/reliable as a USB drive or internal HDD; but also partially because I’ll always trust myself with my data more than I’ll trust ‘the Internet’. So there would need to be some other compelling reasons to have data stored in the cloud. Of course, I also have quite a bit of data in the cloud: emails and such.