The power is out! Oh no, we use Cloud Computing for all our Apps.

Apparently the power is out for a large area in North Kansas City. Good thing I just moved into an office with a bigger window and it's sunny. With the natural light I wouldn't even have noticed the outage had it not been for my Internet connection. "What if the power goes out" is a common refrain from cloud computing critics.

Personally, for the last 10 years or so of my career I've always been dependent on power to work. If the network was down, we were down. This is the first extended power outage I can remember since Kansas City had a huge ice storm probably 8 years ago or so.

Something was different today though. I actually hadn't realized the power went out and thought they were just messing with the wireless connection for the office. I could have gone and asked what they were working on but I really didn't care and I was in the middle of something. I reached over to my Nexus One and turned on the hotspot - I have a button on my home screen. One tap of my finger and I was up and running again - Pandora didn't even miss a beat.

My point is that "a lack of an Internet connection" is becoming less and less of an issue. What if I'm in a plane? Read a book? Write down some thoughts? OK, you can't possibly take advantage of the opportunity to work on something else besides your computer. Offline access varies by application but I'm betting airplanes will all have WiFi in the next couple of years regardless. We're also seeing devices like Google's Cr-48 which has wireless built into the device.

Internet? No problem. Battery life? That's another issue ... I noticed the power was out as I noticed my aging MacBook Pro's battery was running low.