There is a perfectly good reason why document-organizing software needs to be in "the cloud." We live in the cloud. I want access to my stuff from my desktop, my laptop, my phone, from work, from a coffee shop, everywhere.

I want to be able to read a document, write a document, edit a document, share a document whenever I have the time to do so, and I want more software that does this, not less.

The idea of personal clouds is compelling, if we can only make configuration easy, and figure out how to pay the application developers.

If anything, that might be a reason why you want the documents in the "cloud", but why would you want to have the software in the "cloud"?

And, actually, the way the "cloud" was understood before the hype, your documents are "in the cloud" as soon as they are on a computer that is connected to the internet. I don't need a "cloud provider" or even a "personal cloud" in order to access the documents stored on my machine at home from my laptop, both are connected to the internet, that's all that is needed.

That it might be possible to make all of that easier to use is still true, though.

> If anything, that might be a reason why you want the documents in the "cloud", but why would you want to have the software in the "cloud"?

Because otherwise you can't do anything with the documents except from the one computer that you put your $400 software on.

Is that a joke I'm not getting? If not, please explain.

OK, so I have foobar.something stored on my cloud server. If I only have the software to read it on one computer, the existence of that file in the cloud is not useful to me when I'm away from that computer. If the software is also in the cloud, that problem goes away. Cloud-based software solves many of the problems of distribution.

I still don't get it. I would think the internet solves the problem of distribution. If you don't have the software on your computer, you can use the internet to copy it to your computer!?

And the licensing model obviously is completely orthogonal to the execution environment.

OK, fill in the blanks: I have my InDesign document in the cloud. I head down to Kinko's to print it and I _______?

(The realistic answer is "can't unless I brought my laptop" AFAIK.)

I don't have a clue what you can do with InDesign documents or what Kinko's is, but I am pretty sure that running some software "in the cloud" is not the (only) solution.

Other solutions probably would be a different licensing model or an open data format, possibly converting your InDesign document to an open format beforehand, or logging into your computer at home from someone else's machine, or in some other way using software on your machine at home remotely, or probably numerous others, most of them probably with a huge advantage in terms of privacy/resistance to surveillance over a solution where you process your own data in unencrypted form on other people's machines.

And give an open source license.

It might be a pain to install, run and maintain, which is why you pay for the service. But, if the service dies you have a path forward if your life or business depends on it.