This is my biggest fear. On the surface, moving development entirely to the cloud makes life easier. But in reality this also makes it harder for newer generations to understand how computers work. Let's not pretend that, when all dev tools are moved to a machine on the cloud, these company laptops, as "mere clients", will give their "owners"/users root access, or even file system access to the laptop itself. To protect the security of such a centralized cloud, every terminal would probably be as secure as iOS. How do you train the next gen DevOps and OSDev using such lobotomized computers? Consider for a moment, you are a young aspiring computer science student, and all the classes only teach you how to use these jailed devices to write only code you are allowed to write. Would you still have been inspired to become a developer? I wouldn't. Without my love in Linux and kernel customization, I wouldn't have ever picked this major. What's most likely going to happen, is that OSDev and DevOps become arcane arts that can only be learnt by offsprings of the professionals who had access to such internals of the cloud. Let's hope this doesn't lead to Tech Monarchy. EDIT: On a side note, this is proof that purely technical decisions can have serious political consequences. And I weep for our future as our politicians struggle to understand what our developers are forbidden to explain, under NDAs.