I went away to a couple of places, a place in Portugal and a place in the UK, over the summer holiday and both times I took my netbook with me so I could edit photos and, if there was an internet connection, check my emails, Facebook and Twitter. In both places I often had trouble accessing internet despite there being wifi in Portugal and having a 3G card in the UK. I wasn’t too bothered as going on holiday I am happy to enjoy the location and not be concerned with other issues from home, however it did dawn on me that if operating systems are moving more to the cloud what does that mean for places and times when there is no internet.

At home and university I use desktops for nearly everything I do, I sometimes need my netbook around campus or in lectures, and so I use a powerful OS like Windows 7, so would have little need for a cloud OS designed for the lesser powered computers such as netbooks. But the times I do need my netbook it is generally for quick tasks or accessing the internet, when a mobile just isn’t capable of doing the task.

As I mentioned I had issues getting on the internet on holiday but I have had many issues using it at university, through too many people being on it to “planned maintenance” to the wifi and network. A lot of the times I have tried to use my netbook to access the internet I have had issues with it outside of my control, until 4G is really taken up by providers I don’t see much improvement with my experience of the netbook mobile internet. This causes a major problem for cloud OSes. Obviously there is always the option to have a SIM card in newer netbooks to allow a virtually always online experience but the contracts for that can be quite expensive, so too can wifi access in hotels etc.

I assume there will be ways for cloud OSes to run applications locally on netbooks but how much functionality will be lost when not being able to access the cloud. I guess that there will be local file storage access so things can be saved to the netbook, but what about drivers for devices that users might want to plug into the computer. I have never had a problem with connecting devices to an offline Windows machine but how will a lightweight offline cloud OS machine cope?

Another point is that if an OS is able to work just as well offline as it does online is it really a cloud OS? Just because it can store files and run applications using the internet doesn’t make it a cloud OS, I do that with most things on my netbook as it is.

I can see cloud OSes being useful for a computer that has an always on internet, but in that case it is likely to be a desktop and why run a small, light weight OS on that kind of machine. For machines that are designed to be very mobile I can see the benefit of a Cloud OS as it means they don’t need to be very powerful or have a huge amount of storage if everything is pulled from the internet, yet it is this very feature that causes me to be concerned about Cloud OSes. I think I am happier with the idea of having a normal OS that is as useful whether there is internet or not and then opening up a huge amount of cloud services that will enhance and simplify the user experience when there is internet access, like Windows Live currently does. I also don’t want to have pay a subsciption just to be able to use some of the basic features of my computer.

It will be interesting to see how the light weight, cloud operating system of the future work and develop but I am much happier knowing that my computer is going to work the way I want it too in a lead lined room and will only get better to more connected it becomes. I would hate to have a device that was only as good as the connection it had (aside from mobile phones which require much less bandwidth to work than a computer on the internet).