Everyday User’s Future in the Cloud
4 min readI watched the Google Wave demo video today and it got me to thinking quite a bit about the future of IT and how the Internet is about evolve to the next level. If you are at all interested in IT or your life is deeply wrapped around the Internet, I highly recommend to set an hour aside and watch the Google Wave demo video.
I am not going to focus primarily on any one product and I am only talking about the everyday user, not corporate world. What Google is doing and how they are approaching it is game changing. Google in and of itself is not really a software company. Then again they are not really an Internet company. They are a collaborative technology company, leveraging existing infrastructure of the Internet and the users work on existing equipment. Google’s financial success is on ad revenue, which users see ads, but don’t pay anything for the primary product offerings. A small trade off if you complain on the ‘annoyance’ factor.
See a few ads, neatly tucked on the screen (no flash pop ups)… or $99/$199/$299 for a local software suite to do the same thing… and where most users only use about 10% of the full functionality of what that $$$ gets you. Losing a bit of value.
With a cloud based functional model there is no need for an elaborate OS, no need for a super fast computer, no need for complex local installations. You just need an internet connection and a browser and connect to a ‘cloud’ to do office type work, email, chat, social networks, etc…
As a regular user, what’s the first thing people do when the boot their computer. They open a web browser. If you take a slice of people who spend tons and tons of money on elaborate laptops, most only use those over-powered machines to work and play on the Internet. They power is vastly underused and money is wasted. That goes to a perception that faster laptops, mean faster Internet email. They forget the fact of bandwidth pipes.
Back to the migration to the ‘cloud’. Google has grasped and accepted 100,000% that the Internet is where the world will live. We visit the Internet now, but we will soon live there. Won’t be able to function without it very soon. By moving more and more information out there, the need for specialized and personalized equipment will be less and less. This is a very good thing for many reasons.
First is security. Users on the Internet today do not practice nor understand good security. Their systems are wide open most of the time, yet people do banking, spreadsheets, photos, videos all on their unencrypted, easy password laptops. You wonder why identity theft is so prevalent, predators stalk the weak.
Moving that to a secure, protected cloud handled by people who not only understand security but are on the edge of progressing it, is the right move. Then you can access your information from anywhere, from any device. If you have a massive hard drive crash, so what? You data is safe, backed up, accessible. Photos recoverable, videos there forever, and so on…
Potentially laptops and devices will become cheaper and smaller. People will flock to them for their purpose and it’s happening like wild fire now. Netbooks are a gold mine of simplicity and size. Netbooks are not processor powerhouses, they are designed for one specific thing, Internet and day to day productivity. Things that do not require tons of power.
The industry is paying attention and beginning to shift to a ‘cloud’ model along side of Google. Jolicloud is a very intriguing idea to take the netbooks to Internet only model. It’s an OS for the netbook that jumps ahead of the local OS install and makes it truly a cloud computing device. That’s just one example, there are many more brewing in garages around the world that can break this thing wide open. Companies like Google may be setting the precedent, but someone else will leap frog it to the next level of interoperability.
What the move is going to be in the years to come is more and more collaboration of the cloud. Individual emails and documents will become the thing of the past, collaborated communication and sharing will take hold. Applications will be launched in the space of the HTML realm and no more individual installations. The world will live and breathe on the Internet. Tying everything together into the true web that the Internet is moving to.
End of Line.
Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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