You claim it is a Trojan horse, but you failed to explain how or why. Mind elaborating before you make that statement?
The end game for OEMs, carriers and content providers.
1. Data mining
2. Data cap breaches. Carriers are banking on this, since more cloud usage equals more cap breaches and or upgrages of data plans. Seems silly that people would fall for that, but does not take much of a percent for the install base to generate serious revenue.
3. More control of content used by the consumer, plus usage rights.
4. Cheaper cost for the OEM, since less flash storage or ports on the devices (as an aggregate).
Do you folks honestly think the intent of data clouds are for the good of the consumer? Seems the opposite of good,
unless consumers are continued to be offered choices of if they want it or not. So if the industry continues to offer microsd slots, high flash storage, and content for local storage, etc -cool.
Do folks not find it interesting that the carriers are crying about bandwidth and network costs, but they at the same time are guiding people into cloud content which requires more bandwidth than locally stored content?
At the same time pushing 4G devices, even though new users must pay $30 for 2 teeny gigs? And to support their rationale, they use data usage trends based on years of data with a heavy bias of 2G and non Android phone use. They are BANKING on data cap breaches- simple.
None of this is by accident, but a lot of people are banking on acceptance. Sad to say, it is brilliant for them for business $, but can be bad for consumers. Data clouds are not the problem, but the data cap constraints and potential loss of consumer options for hardware IS the problem. (I use my own network cloud data, so "hip" with it, but have an unlimited data plan).
Added:
I can very easily see the current data caps and prices being an FCC issue in 2012, but nothing good tends to happen in these cases. Cloud data usage increases will accelerate this confrontation.
Common word cloud from my rant = banking