Links between RIAs and "the cloud"

A colleague of mine at InfoQ, Deborah Hartmann, emailed me this morning with a thought about the strong link between cloud computing and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). It triggered some thoughts which I'd like to share.

Deborah asked:

Don't [the cloud and RIAs] go hand-in-hand? [...] with more generic services on the server (in the cloud) it's natural that we move toward programming more finesse and usability on the client, right? (i.e. "pull" rather than "push")

My reply:

They definitely do - without having online data storage, RIAs are a lot less compelling.

RIAs seem to be an attempt to create thick-clients that are hosted inside the browser. People are trying to achieve desktop-like functionality, but hosted from a website so that you don't have the whole download/install/update model. I also find it amusing that some RIAs are integrating with e.g. Google Gears or SQLite for offline, local data storage - that puts it even closer to the thick client model.

My observation has been that almost every trend you can imagine oscillates like a sine wave - in this case, the top of the sine wave is centralized CPUs with dumb-terminal clients, and the bottom of the sine wave is standalone general-purpose computers which have all of their data and applications under their own control. In the 70s we were at Unix servers and terms, then we slowly oscillated to the PC, now we are oscillating back to centrlaized servers, this time enabled via the Internet - I will bet you dollars to donuts that in about 7-10 years we will see a move away from cloud computing and back to localized data storage and application management due to the issues of storing data on the cloud (who owns it? what if company X goes out of business and takes all of your data with it? What if company Y gets bought and chnages all sorts of policies and procedures? What if company Z turns out to be evil, selling all of it's data to the Russian Mafia? I'll keep my data where I can see it, thankyouverymuch!).

There's also a bit of a disconnect that I see - I've heard people in Silicon Valley make silly statements like "everyone's using broadband" (I heard that on-site at one of my customers and promptly set them straight). I think that, although RIAs are continuing to be the "cool thing" for at least the next couple of years, the heavy download weight and inherent opacity to search engines are problems that need to be addressed. If a client computer has an API that allows for rich clients to be constructed locally with minimal data sent over the net (e.g. Mozilla XUL) then I think that RIAs will become a real winning proposition for more than a small segment of the internet population (how useful is an RIA on a mobile phone?).