On Living in the Cloud
On data and the delivery thereof, young Michael Mistretta posted his thoughts on living in the cloud today. I’ve had similar thoughts the past few years and this post made me think of the question that floated around the blogosphere some while back: “If you ended up on a deserted island and had to choose between a Mac with no Internet connection and a PC (Windows box) with a connection, which would you choose?”
Michael starts by mentioning that there currently is no way to live in the cloud full time because there is no interface that can allow us to store all of our data online (due to the pipes being too small). But he quickly changes direction with this statement:
But when I began to think about it, the majority of my most important data doesn’t take up much space at all. Almost all of the stuff I’m interacting with on a day-to-day basis can be done in the cloud. Email, RSS, contact information, calendars, web history, chats, login information, and documents all come to just under 5GBs, which can easily be stored online.
Good point. Back to the question above. I’ve always thought that it would be a really tough choice, but I would have to go with the PC on the island. What would I do with a Mac if I had no way to get online? So much of what I do is based on the web. It’s been this way since I really got into computers earlier this decade.
I’d bet that if you looked at the average user’s GB’s of data and it would be comprised primarily of three categories—music, video and photos. Other than those types of items, I’d say we already have the application that Michael refers to:
Now, if only someone would take all the valuable hours they spend coding for the web, and create a native application that automatically interacts with the Internet in the background in order to send and retrieve data for you.
What is the application? The operating system. Modern days operating systems give us the perfect interface between the cloud and our hardware. Individual applications can be looked at as different features of the operating system itself—they either work with the hardware to create content or they allow us to use the cloud to share that content with others.
We live in exciting times. The Internet has become such a part of our lives—across the globe—and I believe we are a lot closer to a blissful relationship between hardware, applications and the Internet than a lot of people realize.
