The Brave Old World of Cloud Computing

See also: Clouds by Joni Mitchell

Why do I get such a futuristic George Jetson-y thrill  whenever I save a document in my home Dropbox or Google drive folder and re-open it with all changes intact on my work machine?  Why such excitement over what is essentially a very user-friendly ftp client?

Aside from the obvious answer (I'm weird), there's another principle at work: great UI seldom depends upon bleeding-edge technology. In most cases, the gear that underlies some hot development like a Windows desktop system (then) or an iPad (now) has existed for years but was never widely used because it was just too difficult for regular people to operate. If you showed a UNIX programmer from 1981 a 2013 Macintosh command line interface, he (for in 1981, it was probably a he and a bearded he to boot) would be impressed by all the power under the hood but wouldn't find a lot that's new in the code needed to get around inside.

This is in keeping with the progress of a a new technologiy, which usually goes something like this

1. clever somebody invents it
2. bunch of propeller heads fool with it for a while 
3. propeller head demos pique interest of usability designer
4. usability designer builds widely copied open-source prototype
5. wily capitalist finds way to sell a variation on that prototype
6. monetized variation hits the bigtime, is widely adopted by non-techies
7. Years pass. People marry, have children, grow old and die.
8. your cable company includes it in your 3-for-1 bundle.

Note that new technology and great usability almost never arrive in tandem. (The exception to the rule might be Apple's airport base station, which managed to be innovative and elegant.) Computers grew smaller and cheaper all through the late '70s and early '80s but didn't turn into essential home appliances until they stopped demanding their users learn complex command lines. Likewise, touch screens, cell phones with computing power (tip calculators anyone?) , and mp3 players were all around before 2007, but they had never been put together in such an elegant and easy-to-use package as the iPhone before. When mature technology gainss a really friendly UI makeover and distribution model like the one that turned ftp storage into cloud computing, the ease and naturalness of the experience makes you (me) forget that you ever used anything like it before. And that is precisely the point.