Head(phones) in the Cloud: New music services extend cloud services at the consumer-level
By Bryan Reed on Wed, June 01, 2011
In a 2009 Wired story about the rise of netbooks, Clive Thompson reached something of a revelation: "It turns out that about 95 percent of what I do on a computer can now be accomplished through a browser," he wrote. Web-based applications had moved consumers' most common functions - e-mail, entertainment, and word processing - to the cloud.
And in today's "post-PC" world, where netbooks are quickly losing market share to tablets and smartphones, Thompson's revelation comes off a little, well, quaint. Now, Amazon and Google have moved consumer computing further (higher?) into the cloud with both companies introducing cloud-based music storage services. Apple is reportedly nipping at their heels with a "music locker" service of its own - perhaps called iCloud.
Running in parallel, Google also announced recently its newly developed Chromebook, promising "nothing but the web." In essence a tablet with a keyboard, the Chromebook - which debuts in June with two models each from Acer and Samsung - runs Google's Chrome OS and relies entirely on cloud-based apps and a virtual desktop interface.
For consumers, though, this isn't all that radical. Most of us have been working in the cloud for years, relying on Hotmail or Gmail for e-mail. Business, though, despite major inroads from cloud-based Software-as-a-Service applications - such as our own LMS offerings - still harbors reservations about relying too heavily on the cloud.
And those reservations are justified, as we've seen major and impactful outages in recent months.
But new developments in consumer-based cloud computing suggest that professional applications of the technology, increasing in scale, won't be far behind.
0 Comments