> Because I am not stupid to pay monthly fees instead of single upfront licenses.

You also have to think about the cost of hosting, maintaining, monitoring, etc. Usually a service fee by a provider is much smaller than the cost of doing all this yourself. Of course there is some inflection point where it may be cheaper to do it yourself. And during development and while you're still small, most service providers offer a generous free plan.

> Because my desktop screams while my net connection is so so.

Can't argue with that one.

> Because a native UI kicks the sh*t out of any web interface, in looks, perfomance and integration.

Totally agree. Like I said in the post, I still write my code locally.

> Because I am paranoid and I like my data in MY local net.

Are you paranoid about your development data?

> Because I do not mind a bunch of (easily scriptable) installs.

...

> I short because the technical problems I am trying to solve go way beyond a trivial LAMP app...

I would argue that this is a good reason to you use services since they will deal with all the hard stuff of running these non-trivial services. The more complicated your application, the more value you'll get out of using services.

>You also have to think about the cost of hosting, maintaining, monitoring, etc.

Well, for a development environment, the costs of all that should be zero, in terms of dollars. In terms of time, you'll have to spend some time maintaining your development environment, whether you have it in the cloud or locally. Adding a monetary cost to that just seems foolish.

Remember, we're not talking about deploying to the cloud. We're talking about developing on the cloud. Spending real money, in addition to my time for a project that I'm going to open source or possibly abandon is foolish.

> Because I am not stupid to pay monthly fees instead of single upfront licenses.

You just insulted everyone here who pays monthly fees for software, including Github & Dropbox customers.

In addition, the overwhelming success of SaaS vs native apps leads me to think that your personal tastes and concerns are not representative of the average consumer.

When the average consumer has to choose between two goods they don't understand, they always base their decision on price. As they become more savvy, they begin to understand why the market has other, more complex or expensive, options. SaaS may have been a success in the short term, but our industry tends to have centralization/decentralization cycles. We seem to be in a centralization phase right now, but the downside of that is well-known, it just hasn't manifested in a catastrophic way recently. Once it does, I'd expect a large (but not total) exodus from SaaS back to run-this-on-your-own-hardware solutions like we've had in the past.

That's an interesting perspective. I agree we have gone through cycles of centralization/decentralization and that events will cause flutters of movement in both directions, that's natural. As another comment mentioned, a hybrid approach will likely be a strong story in the years to come.

However the real purpose of innovation is not to simply drive price down, rather, to create enabling technologies that move mankind forward and allow people to do things they've never even imagined. We're seeing massive things with massive processing power and data, all while someone else manages that infrastructure, who LOVES managing things at scale, who I can't afford to hire an who has become the expert I never will be.

If the goal is simply to reduce cost, then we aren't creating something big. We're just moving money around.

In a way, I think reducing cost is often (not always) a necessary first step to enabling the big-picture visions you're describing. For example, cheap desalination means water for drought-struck Saharan Africans; cheap food saves lives worldwide; cheap computing leads to the situation we have today. "Moving money around" is not valueless by itself; that is, after all, what banks (and even currency itself) exist to accomplish, and manage to scrape by at it.

But again, taking your position at face value, I would counter that the level of expertise needed to maintain the data needs of most people is very modest compared to the level of expertise needed to sell everyone that amount of data at scale. If your needs are not dramatic (and most people's aren't) then "the cloud" may turn out to be more expensive than doing it yourself on top of the usual downsides of outsourcing. Not everybody has a scalability problem. And if you do have a scalability problem but your income is directly proportional to the scale, it may be cheaper to run it yourself anyway and hire those scalability experts. There are more cloud providers every year, not fewer, and Amazon and Google did it out of necessity and made a profit long before they realized they could monetize it.

In short, I think there are arguments for and against, like everything else, and people should understand the upsides and the downsides before choosing. Once the pendulum swings back there will be people leaving the cloud who probably should be there and I'll be arguing for them to use it, but for right now it seems like the herd is recklessly choosing the cloud without understanding why.

Inshallah. I was just thinking about this today in the context of networking and systems research playing against each other. Improvement on networking problems leads to a centralization cycle, but then systems become the bottleneck and we end up needing to improve that.

If it makes you feel any better, a comment on the Internet did not insult me at all.

>In addition, the overwhelming success of SaaS vs native apps leads me to think that your personal tastes and concerns are not representative of the average consumer.

Can we call this the Market Fallacy? "It sells most, therefore consumers must have wanted it above all possible alternatives."

Wrong. Consumers wanted it above all available alternatives. Key problem here is that software makers have been getting themselves out of the business of single-upfront-license proprietary, desktop software for nearly 15 years now, as hard as they can. They don't like competing with free (the open-source alternatives or the pirates). And didn't PG write a whole damned essay on this recently?

Just because SaaS is easier to treat as excludable economic property doesn't make it better.