"I like your metric of comparing bus speed to Internet connection speed. I would say that network speed will never be as fast as a PC's bus speed. However, I don't think it has to be for cloud computing to make sense. Network speed just has to be fast enough.With the currently-available network bandwidth, applications with heavy I/O (input/output, for our less techie readers), such as your example of video-editing software, make more sense to host on one's local machine. The reason is because of its I/O requirements, not processor speed. Providers of serious cloud computing service, in which you host your own applications in their server farm (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, for instance), actually offer more processor power than you could find on a typical desktop.Cloud computing is a tradeoff between processor power and I/O speed. However, as available network bandwidth improves, this tradeoff will become less and less significant and more I/O-intensive applications will be possible..." - Ethan Bauley