Success Quote by John W. Thompson

“Always there” is doing the heavy lifting here: it’s a promise disguised as a technical observation. John W. Thompson, speaking from the vantage point of enterprise power and boardroom pragmatism, frames Web services less as a software architecture and more as a new social contract between companies and users. The line smuggles in a worldview where computing isn’t a thing you own or install; it’s a relationship you’re continually in, mediated by networks and governed by whoever runs “somewhere in the cloud.”

The intent is persuasion through inevitability. By describing the link as persistent, Thompson normalizes dependence: the application lives off-premises, but it feels proximate, like a utility. That rhetoric mattered in the long transition from shrink-wrapped software and corporate data centers to SaaS subscriptions and hyperscale platforms. “Resident somewhere” is a coy phrase that softens the central tradeoff: the user gains convenience, updates, and scale, while control migrates to the provider. Location becomes abstract on purpose; abstraction is how you make outsourcing feel like progress.

The subtext is also about power and surveillance, though it doesn’t announce itself. If the connection is “always there,” so is the potential for monitoring, throttling, gating features, changing terms, and monetizing behavior. In the business context Thompson inhabits, that permanence is a revenue model (recurring subscriptions) and a strategic moat (ecosystems and lock-in). The quote works because it paints dependency as seamlessness: an “always-on” bond that sounds like freedom, right up until it becomes hard to unplug.