The Cloud
Posted on August 11, 2008
Filed Under All, Context, Technology |
So, we were among the many who had trouble accessing our email on Google’s Gmail system today. It was a bit of a shock: Google’s cloud products are normally so reliable. And that got me thinking about software in ‘the cloud.’
Apple’s Steve Jobs was quoted earlier today to say that Apple was on track to earn $360 million from the iPhone Apps Store. Great news for us shareholders, but not big news for me, iPhone user. I’m not a compulsive game player, and lacking a useful digital voice recorder program (the two available so far are pretty raw), I’m not likely to add to the revenue stream. And I’m only rarely buying software for my home Mac, either.
One of the reasons for that is Google’s cloud-based apps. Their mobile calendar looks like an iPhone app, and solves the ‘push’ problem by avoiding it altogether. I use the iPhone’s Mail App, but I filter all my mail through Gmail, thanks to the excellent spam filter, which has hooked me on Gmail in Firefox on the Mac (Gmail’s eccentricities notwithstanding). I wish that the Gmail browser client was as nice as .Mac (or .Me or MobileMe or whatever it’s called now), but Google’s reliability far eclipses any of Apple’s online efforts. Maybe Apple and Google need to get together…
Browser-run software, on modern, ultrafast systems, comes close to running as well as HD-resident software, and - big plus - doesn’t (yet) have the bloat of decades-old resident apps. There may always be niche-resident stuff, and there are still things that manipulate huge datasets (photo and video apps come to mind): CPU speed goes up faster than bandwidth. But at some point, bandwidth is such that cloud apps are good enough…
Comments
Leave a Reply