How breaking my own "law" made it clear that Cloud Computing is the real deal

Cloud Computing has been one of those Holy Grails of computer science. I remember being in High School and watching a talk by Scott McNealey of Sun Microsystems making loud claims about how everybody will just have simple terminals with Internet access and store everything in data centers. And look where that kind of thinking got him.

But there are now signs that finally Cloud Computing is on its way here. You only have to look at changes in your own personal computing to see the proof.

For example, there's more and more applications that are faster for me in the Cloud. The first one that comes to mind is Gmail, which is faster than Outlook or Apple's Mail.app. Another is spreadsheets and text documents. It's faster for me to just hit the "Documents" link on Gmail (which is almost always open), and then hit New -> Spreadsheet (or Document), rather than fire up those Microsoft Office beasts, Word and Excel. Plus, people are already weary enough about loading attachments.

Another example is looking at hard disk usage. In 2006, I tried to invent a law, like a tongue-in-cheek version of Moore's Law:

Dhingra's Law (Fallacy) of Disk Usage
The typical consumer believes that by doubling his hard drive capacity today, he will have more than enough space for tomorrow. 18 months later, he is at maximum capacity.

I wrote that in 2006, and that had been true for me up to that point in time. But now things are different. The latest desktop I bought has less total hard drive space than my old machine. I had about a terabyte before, while as now, I have 750GB. The difference is that I stopped hording files. There was a time when it was a chore to download good mp3s or movies. As a result, you kept organized folders of your media, which required gigs upon gigs of space. But now, with services like Hulu, BitTorrent, and Lala, I have no need to archive media. I watch whatever I want, delete it, and if I want to watch it again, it'll take me 10 min. to fetch it. I've noticed that with games too. I used to keep copies of my games archived in case I wanted to play them again (I never did), but now I just use Steam, and re-download the ones I want, delete the ones that I don't.

Google is betting big on Cloud Computing. Chrome OS will simply be a web browser, with no user-accessible hard disk space. Will they reach the Holy Grail this time, or will they suffer the same fate as Sun?