People keep tying more and more network functionality into their non-networked products. How long will it be until iTunes on my Mac (or PC) won’t play even my local music if it can’t get to phobos.apple.com? When livejournal goes down, do most OpenID users lose the ability to log into *anything*? Taking out an Active Directory server will incapacitate a Windows-dependent corporation.

I’ve thought about the pros and cons of hosted solutions before, but mostly in the context of data ownership, retention, and use. Second to that I’ve considered the perceived value of presenting your own data vs someone else presenting it for you. (These issues came up at work, of course). But I haven’t really thought about the ramifications of loss of service. It seemed impossible that Google, all of Google, would go down; but that is exactly what you describe. It’s a bit scary how vulnerable and dependent we’re becoming.