For those that do not know the future is all in the cloud. So what does this mean. The idea is simple. All your digital content (music, videos, photos, word documents, pdfs, psds.....everything) in one place, on a web server. So why do this? The easiest answer is convenience. There was a time when we thought our devices would all converge into one super device. One device which is our computer, phone, games system, media station etc. The reality is that convergence is DEAD!!!!
In our highly mobile society we have different needs depending on the task we are performing. These needs heavily influence the size of the device. For example a business person fine tuning a presentation might want the luxury of a 15 inch screen to view material. When s/he goes for a run they might want a small music player. So why converge into one device? Doing the presentation on a small mp3 size screen isn't suited to the task and running with a 15inch screen strapped to your arm is not really going to improve your personal best. So i repeat, Convergence is DEAD!
The future is Divergence, many devices! and that is where the cloud needs to come in. Why should my mp3 player store a copy of my music collection, my laptop store another copy of my music collection and my media TV store yet another exact copy of my music collection? I then have 3 copies of my music collection to maintain. The cloud can allow me to have just one music collection that all my devices can access via a high speed data connection.....Clever huh?.....
Well yes, but there are obviously challenges to overcome. Now i don't want to go into privacy and security issues of storing all your content on the web. I want to to accelerate the death of another technology that is holding back the progression of this use of the cloud.....SYNCHRONISATION. Yes back to this idea of having multiple copies of the same thing on all your devices. Some people think this is great because you don't have the privacy/security issues of storing on the web. However the simple fact is that synchronisation just cannot provide the same experience because devices are limited by the amount of data they can store. Consider this, I have a macbook with 120GB hardisk, an Ipod with a 32GB hardisk and a mobile phone with a 4GB memory card. Simple physics dictates that i cannot keep these in perfect sync. The data on my macbook will not fit on my ipod, and the data on my ipod will not fit on my phone. Therefore it is quite common for me to get angry when i want to show a friend a cool music video on my ipod, and realise that it didn't fit on the device and it is instead on my macbook at home. This would work if all devices had the same hardisk space...but that is just never going to happen.
So let us all dress up in funny clothes and do a little rain dance. We need clouds!
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