Honestly? This goes further back to Gmail, Google Chrome, and the rise of the SaaS/PaaS era IMO. Who needs "software" and "files" when everything runs in the browser, right?
Hell, Chromebooks are exactly that unless you hack them, and despite everyone seeming to have forgotten about them, they're still a thing, still successful, and especially scarily, are being given to millions of students every year.
People complain "oh these kids with their iphones don't know how to use a filesystem" but our education system continues to give them fake net appliances instead of real computers to this day. Even the awful, locked down NT instances I grew up with were more computer than "your laptop is just Chrome now, better learn Google Docs."
In 2019, the Corporation that owned the Rehab I worked at had issued an ultimatum: They were developing psychometric assessment software in house and it was on my facility, my department specifically, to implement it into our standardized assessment scheme. A year and a half later, I quit my job; partly because staff cuts made during 2020 made implementation of this deeply flawed, completely unproven, completely useless software utterly inadequate for clinical purposes. The road from the request to try it out in June of 2019 and my resignation in mid December of 2020 is a long and twisted one which involves a lot more than just software hijinx, but since this thread is about the gradual death of local file storage and the internet of things, I thought I'd share my Clinical Psychology experience with how these systems function in real time. If anyone has ever worked with records protected by HIPPA, the U.S. Healthcare Law protocol for patient records and data, you can already see where this is going. The software came to us on Chromebooks, freshly shipped in January of 2020, and it used regular ass Chrome with a very basic encryption scheme.
The software, as was true for most of our health records, had to communicate to the office in Tennessee. I had been building an independent, Intranet-Only software with a team of friends that had way more features than the Corporate Product, due to the staffing issues of 2020. By the time I was interfacing with this Chromebook piece of shit Corporate (the CEO in particular) had direct stake in, we were about six months into planning and coding. I'd been so desperate to get my version of the software up off the ground, I offered my facility CEO and the corporate CEO exclusive licensing rights for 10 years. Sadly, I hadn't personally sucked the Corporate CEO's dick so we did not get funding and my software got canned. This is my story.
