What are your thoughts on cloud only devices (and online DRM)

It would be interesting to see a discussion about the flood of cloud only devices in the market now, as well as things with the same flaws such as online DRM.

A trend in recent years, has been the the release of many products which are cloud only, e.g., dropcam, vuezone, nest, and many others. The issue with many of the cloud based devices, is that they are reliant on a profit motivated company keeping their servers running, and offering the services you need. The issue comes in when they decide that it is no longer profitable to keep the servers running, then the products you purchase, instantly become paperweights.

 

In virtually every case, the cloud requirements are unnecessary for the full functioning, e.g., a traditional IP camera can be viewed on most mobile devices, record content locally and remotely, and depending on the camera, or DVR, also send out alerts to all connected devices. A consumer friendly approach will be to allow users to specify an IP or use DDNS as an alternative to enjoy all functions for free.

Overall it seems that many companies are using the cloud to open new revenue streams at the cost of longevity of their products. Many of these companies go too great lengths to strip out all local access,in addition to stripping the OS to make sure that nothing can be enabled to allow any local access. This means that the product has no future reliability. You can buy the product at the store and have it become a paperweight on the way home because the company decided to kill the servers.

 

This also extends to the realm of DRM. if you purchase a product or application which requires a constant internet connection even for single player, or even a simple online activation, then the product will only last as long as the DRM servers. (e.g., without going with a cracked copy, can a user be sure that they can install their old games and enjoy them? )