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>On-line document editing, on-line spreadsheets, on-line 3D modelling, on-line recipes, on-line weight tracking, on-line todo lists... Store everything in the cloud, use everything through the browser.

Documents, recipes and to-do lists gain two legitimate and significant advantages from being cloud based: sharing and collaboration. There are disadvantages too, but it's a trade-off.

With a mouse driver, there's no trade-off; it's just all disadvantages.

There are some advantages, at least in the case of a programmable mouse like the one in question. Once you've got all seven thousand buttons programmed Just So, you can then upload the profile to the cloud and have it automatically synced with any other machine you might happen to use the mouse with -- say, a PC at a LAN party.

Of course, this is about as small as an advantage can get, since I'm struggling to think of a person who cares that much about their mouse profile who wouldn't also lug their own PC to the party. So it's not all disadvantages, it's just nearly all disadvantages.

just save the settings to a human readable file instead of something ridiculous like The Registry then they can symlink it to dropbox if they care that much

The advantage you named is no advantage: the mouse could store its configuration on the mouse, just like other gaming mice do.

It's a "professional gaming mouse", it's supposed to be used by progamers (the ones that regulary go to LAN tournaments, have many gaming computers, and destroy 20 mouses a year). I can see how syncing mouse settings between mouses can be useful for them.

Still the execution is awful.

That's true. The difference is that the cloud is a really good way to solve collaboration and sharing, and a really poor way to solve settings syncing for a device that is not otherwise internet-related.

> Until someone figures out how to put Internet into a bucket to use as a battery, please let me work off-line when I want.

Offline storage. Page caching. It does exist. It is the functional equivalent to batteries in more ways than one too - you are limited in capacity, but not as much in transfer rate.

> Offline storage. Page caching. It does exist.

But unfortunately it doesn't always work. Point in case: Google Maps offline mode on tablet sometimes doesn't work, because every now and then Google Maps app needs to contact Internet for something, and won't let you use it off-line until it connects and gets what it wants. Not fun if you're in the middle of nowhere at that moment.

Making everything SaaS neatly solves the piracy problem. There's a business incentive to only let your users rent your software.

It doesn't solve the piracy "problem", but it does mitigate it somewhat, and it prevents file sharing. Piracy is still very simple for SaaS. It's just a matter of sharing an account between multiple users. That's easy to detect on a large scale, but basically impossible to reliably detect when it's just between a couple of friends. And once you start trying to detect and prevent the latter case, the solution stops being so neat after all.

A better solution is to make sure that there is significant value for a user having her own, personal account. I think in many cases, if you can solve that, you'll be able to solve it for either SaaS or the classic installation model.

No one has to let you work offline. You can choose to do so yourself by using offline applications if that's something you care about.

But web-based applications have major advantages to the application provider. First and foremost they have better distribution. I can write an app, and then hand you a link (and you know there's no commitment in clicking, so you do). I can show you why you should use my app on my front page, and then I can give you a demo, all without you having to confirm any "are you sure you want to make permanent changes to your system" dialog.

Now of course one can't easily make the above argument for a mouse driver. But I'm responding to your sentiment that too many things are web connected in general.

> No one has to let you work offline. You can choose to do so yourself by using offline applications if that's something you care about.

Except that it's hard to do this across multiple devices now (especially when most of them are not PCs), because everyone got on the cloud bandwagon and don't let user own the data anymore.

> But web-based applications have major advantages to the application provider.

(emphasis mine)