It is made convenient for the average user, to fight piracy, software re-selling, and such.
M$ doing what it can do best. not software, no, money.
May i suggest something/ change the Thread title to:
"DRM - and what the Future of Personal compuuting will bring"
it could attract more Views, as i personally would like everyone to read this.
Its really a subject that keeps me thinking, at times, and i feel you made a good start at explaining the subject.
One simple example of Cloud computing, i am sure you will find others:
Online Games like
Travian -
www.travian.com
or
Tribal wars
www.tribal-wars.com
I play on two servers in the German Variant of Tribal wars, called Die-Staemme.de, and my PC is simply acting as an input/output device for the calculations made by their system. My PC calculates nothing, all that is really needed is my Wireless modem to send the information, the Keyboard and mouse to gather input, and the Monitor to do the output.
GPU, CPU, RAM are nnothing but relay stations for the Data, The Browser Window is its GUI, and no data is stored on a HDD.
-> simplified<-
That is ok for me, as its a free game, and i watch what i do.