Method 3

Cloud Computing
As I sit writing this on Google Docs, I remember buying my first copy of a word processing program for my home computer. It was WordPerfect if that tells you anything and that was all I bought that day; not a set of programs running a spreadsheet or presentation or emails or anything else. They did not even exist back then. And it wasn't cheap either.
The last big package I bought was MS Office 2003 and it cost me $599 on Amazon with an education discount. MS Office 2007 would cost me more than my present notebook computer did. Turns out my university who buys a site license for the campus will give me a copy to use on my home computer so I have not had to buy it yet and I probably never will now. My campus isn't a rich one and their site license for MS Office cost an arm and a leg. The library uses it in our offices, our homes, and our computer lab but not on our public terminals. We don't have any option for off campus users to type a letter or a resume and we have a lot of off campus users. That's one reason why I learned to use Google Docs. It is cheap (try free) and usable. My customers may never write a book on it but who cares.
I even use it myself on my notebook computer instead of loading MS Office on it. Then I just transfer it to my office machine and reformat it into MS Word. I've lost things that I wrote in Word on my home computer so I know it happens but I am not going to spend any long amount of time worrying about it. I back up my typing on a memory stick and if it should go missing from the web before I transfer it I still have it. I also like the ability to work from anywhere. For security sake, the university will not let most of us get into our campus machines from home although there are plenty of tools to do that. The cloud lets me truly work from home. And although we do not work together often on projects I know that the cloud would let me do that do.
And no I don't worry about Big Brother watching over me. I have other things to worry about. Like buying the next expensive reference book with a budget that just got cut by 30 %.