J. Eddie Smith, IV:
Before sync became such a reliable reality, computing was basically a two-dimensional concept: you chose hardware, and then you chose the software to run on your hardware (not necessarily in that order).
This only if you never had two or more computers. Those that had to manage a multi-computer environment have invested a lot of energy into solving this problem.
The cloud is indeed making things easier as it takes the role of the reference version or the master, while most of the previous solutions were more or less peer to peer setups that had to manually address conflicts. The more machines you had the more chances to run into conflicts. That’s not to say that conflicts are not possible in a cloud environment though. But if you always consider the remote version the master, then things will be slightly simpler.
