Google and Apple fight for World Domination. (Cloud Computing)
In the stone age of computing, computers were so expensive that only huge companies could afford getting one.
These companies then rented out computing power for insanely high fees to people who really needed some, having a dictatorial control over their data and actions. Then, as minicomputers and microcomputers appeared and as computer prices dropped, individuals and organizations managed to become independent from that horrible system which more or less disappeared from the surface of the Earth.
Only traces of it remain in the form of supercomputer rental for a few highly computer-intensive tasks. However, many companies have very good memories
of those times and would like to get them back in the form of what’s called “cloud computing“, which is the second massive-destruction weapon targeting general-purpose personal computers.
Cloud computing is about having people rely on online services (such as Google’s or Apple’s) for tasks where they could nowadays use their computer and remain independent from those services and their owners. Cloud advocates defend themselves by invoking reliability and simplicity (those companies do backups, don’t open executable files in spams when running as an admin user, don’t try to crack software, and generally have skilled computers engineers taking care of the system and its data so they indeed get much more reliable and snappy systems than the average Joe’s computer), along with the ability for one to get access to his data from everywhere (relying on the assumption that the user is stupid and won’t understand that he won’t be the only one getting
ubiquitous access to his data).
Interestingly enough, the cloud concept sometimes merges together with the idea of getting everything from a single vendor for the sake of better consistency (giving said vendor insane power, amounts of money, and knowledge of your life).
As I said before, the cloud idea is inherently opposed that of general-purpose, “smart” personal computers. Cloud companies, to the contrary, want their users to get dumb terminals, computers which are almost solely able to browse the web (and more specifically optimize access to the vendor’s online services).
By almost, I mean that some “transition” OSes exist at the moment. Since some tasks that can be done offline can’t be done online at the moment, those OSes allow to do such things, whilst putting any other task “on the cloud”. The most perfect example of a cloud-oriented OS is Google’s Chrome OS, with Apple’s iPhone OS being another vision of the cloud concept which leads to the same result, but has more power and less reliability than a pure webby
OS because it uses native code in places.If the cloud idea catches on and proves to be technically realistic (whether games and video
editing can be put on the cloud remains to be seen), general-purpose personal computers as we know them will gradually disappear, replaced by dumb devices that can be carried everywhere and are almost solely designed for using online services.
As network technology improves more and more things will be done on the web and less things will be done locally, making the desktop and laptop market shrink dramatically.
In the end, Google and Apple will get into some big fight for world domination and the Earth will be destroyed through nuclear weapons… Just kidding. I think.
And you, what do you think about that subject?
Do you think that general-purpose personal computing is going to become marginal, that low-end computers which are nothing more than tools are the way to go for individuals? Or that this market is here to stay, that touchscreen devices will be able to get into general-purpose computing, that we’ll reach some kind of equilibrium where both devices have their respective place, and that the whole cloud computing thing will be put to a halt by enlightened people brutally understanding how wrong the idea of giving too much power to big companies is?
by Neolander
This entry was posted
on Thursday, May 6th, 2010 at 9:39 am and is filed under Mobile Computing.
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