Our future prison hell: All our data in the cloud, computers dumbed down and locked

The trend in the IT world today is beyond disturbing, but I give it 10-20 years tops and everything will be in the cloud, meaning all your data will be on the internet, be it an online word processor, online game, online everything. Businesses and companies have already started this long ago, with most of their services running in the cloud. It saves them the cost of having to buy the hardware themselves, but the drawbacks are that you no longer have control over your servers, and when the cloud is down, your business is down.

"Of course, much of this will come as its clients migrate from legacy products (like Microsoft Office) to cloud-based offerings (like Office 365), so there’s some cannibalization involved. And the shift is a project that Microsoft has been working on for years, thanks to moves made by Ballmer. Ballmer, it seems, was better at building an enterprise business than effectively bashing rivals in consumer tech."

[link to time.com]

That's in addition to all the obvious privacy issues as well:
[link to www.techtangerine.com]

[link to gcn.com]
(that article is a bid old, and says within 5 years, I give it 10-20 though).

Another worrying trend is the locking down of computers, and operating systems. Windows 10 is built basically with tablets and small devices in mind, and it wants to prevent you from installing other operating systems.

[link to www.pcworld.com]

"In this future, the worst-case scenario means you’ll need to hunt down special PCs designed for Linux—ones that will likely be more expensive. Say goodbye to running Linux on all those PCs that came with Windows, just as you can’t install Linux on an iPad today. Linux PCs will exist, but they’ll be specialty, expensive bits of kit."

This, in addition to all the Xbox,PS4, Tablets, means that you are at the mercy of the manufacturer, no more customization, no more building your own pc, no more tweaking, everything will be spoon fed to you. They are trying to makes us dumber every day.

I'm not saying the PC is totally dead yet, but soon you won't be able to do anything unless you plug into the internet, and everything you do / own will be stored there and nowhere else.