The "Apps" and the "Cloud"

Internet users are service users. A service is the combination of:

• information processing,
• shared storage space.

In the past, both processing and storage happened on the server side; clients only handled display:

Now that every browser supports JavaScript (a programming language that can process information inside the page you are viewing) and mobile devices are widespread, information processing is done more and more — and sometimes exclusively — on the client side, that is on users’ devices:

Servers, for their part, mostly provide storage only (and sometimes nothing else). That storage covers public data (web pages), applications (JavaScript or native mobile apps), and users’ personal data.

In the 1970s this was called a “client-server” architecture with “thick clients”. Today we call it “apps” and “the cloud”. It is worth remembering that these are only marketing terms.

And this design of the network and of services is the opposite of what the founders of the Internet dreamed of… and it comes with many drawbacks.