There is a strong wind blowing the Cloud space these days, and we are about to be part of a great shift in computing.
Web apps seem to be the next logical frontier to be reached, where URLs will be a thing of the past. ReadWriteWeb wrote the following about the new version of Google Chrome:
With the address bar disappearing further into the background, Web apps will again take on an increased relevance, as users navigate by clicking on Web app icons, rather than typing in URLs – much as they are used to navigating OSX or Windows. In many ways, URLs are a holdover from a past time. Just as we don’t type command line strings into a DOS window on a Windows machine very much if ever anymore, Google wants our Web experience to consist of point and click, not mistaken backslashes and misspelled domain names.
We all have heard about Google’s new Chromebook:
Today Google announced a new netbook offering, called Chromebook. It’s being touted as a new kind of computer that offers “nothing but the web.” A chromebook will look like a laptop, only it won’t have any software programs or storage space. The only thing it has is a web browser, from which you will be able to access your email (from Gmail or other online mail services), calendar (Google calendar), documents (most likely from Google Docs), social networks (like Facebook) and any other web-based service.
Yes, you read that right. It has no storage space. Are we falling into an always connected paradigm where internet connections don’t fail?
Fred Wilson wrote recently:
On the flight west to SF this past week, I did the entire 6 hour flight on my Nexus S with gogo inflight mobile. I was streaming music using rdio, blogging on typepad, doing mail and calendaring on google apps, and reading blogs on the android browser. It worked great.
What would’ve happened if Fred was flying JetBlue, which famously doesn’t support wifi on their planes? Or what if the plane itself had an issue with its wifi antenna?
That is where I thought Apple, with its iCloud announcement, would finally teach the world how Cloud computing is done. We need local storage, people! Jobs did reveal some interesting things, but unfortunately with one major flaw: all the content lives in all the devices, not part of it. So it’s an all or nothing proposition. There’s a couple of other major gripes, like the fact that all the iCloud music that you lose is Re-DRM’d when you download again, as Om Malik comments:
Until then, Apple’s practice of serving up DRMed downloads to paying customers more than two years after the company announced with big fanfares that it would abandon DRM serves as an important reminder: Once businesses and consumers buy into a copy protection scheme, they’re gonna have a hard time getting rid of it.
I also hate the fact that the iCloud for photos will only store the last 1,000 photos of your library. Why? Why not let me pay extra and have my 10,000 photos on your service?
There are two Google applications that I think are doing the right Cloud approach:
- Google Music Beta: Yes, it’s painful to watch your whole library get uploaded via a crappy upstream connection, but once it’s up, the sky is the limit (pun intended). You can listen to your whole library in any computer or Android phone without having to download any of it. But, if you want to consume certain albums in the subway, you can flag albums or playlists for offline use in your Android device. The Google Music for Android app also lets you do smart caching of songs or albums you listen to often without having to mark them manually.
- Picasa: This was a piece of software I tried several times over the years and was never convinced about it. I decided to give it another try this week and I was amazed at how good it has become (I tried the Mac Version of it). What I love about most about it is that it’s a hybrid: it’s a local client (or app) that let’s you scan your iPhoto or other folders locally, and then you can edit them, crop them, rotate them, geotag them, and once your content is up to par, you create albums that then you can “smart sync” with Picasa’s web albums. Once this is done, any changes to the albums either on the web or on your local computer, are synced with other machines. If you need more storage, you can pay (cheaply) for it. Once you have all your photo libraries up, they are synced automatically to your Android device, without downloading them. I believe a low-res thumbnail is downloaded to your phone and once you click on any photo, the high-res version is streamed down from the cloud.
Gmail and Google Docs are the 900 pound gorilla here, as they don’t offer offline access for your data. This is such a priority in my mind that I don’t understand why Google hasn’t solved it yet (reportedly they’re working on it).
The best approach for a successful cloud model, I believe, to have the cloud as the central repository with all the data in it (and pay for whatever space is needed), but allow users both online and offline selective access from any device anywhere either via apps or web portals.
Anything else is just an unacceptable fog.
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