I see a practical use: I dont' care what device I am on, I always have my contacts in sync, I can now see the same tabs open, I can access my presentation which I started yesterday on MBP on my iPhone.
But there is no reason we couldn't do that with a basic home or small office network, adding basic VPN functionality to allow remote access if necessary. It's not particularly difficult to set these things up today for anyone who can set up a broadband router and home wireless network. If they were the must-have technologies being promoted instead of the cloud then it would get even easier, as the people making the equipment built more user-friendly interfaces that didn't need much in the way of technical skills at all, and as ready-made server software to co-ordinate your mail or calendar or music collection or whatever became as simple as a one-click download.
My contacts? Not vital at all. My presentations? Not vital at all. My music? Not vital at all.
Somehow I suspect you'd disagree if all your contacts started getting phishing e-mails that looked like they came from you, or if you blew a million-dollar business deal because your presentation wasn't available when you visited a prospective client, or if you had thousands of dollars' worth of music that you'd spent real money on and it disappeared overnight because the service provider closed down the system or you didn't realise you couldn't transfer something between accounts or you sync'd the wrong thing the wrong way. Things like these can and do happen, but I think there's a perception of "It'll never happen to me".
Because when I figure in my time needed to configure and maintain this decent, cheap and local storage it is not that cheap anymore.
I guess you're looking at this from a personal point of view. I'm not sure it's really true even then, but I acknowledge that setting up and maintaining IT systems today does require technical skills that most home users don't have, and if your new tablet or laptop or smartphone ships with the vendor's pet cloud services already integrated then of course that's an easier user experience since it just works (as long as you're happy to use those services and don't want any others).
I don't really buy that argument at all for businesses, though. Usually there are all kinds of gotchas if you're doing serious work in the cloud. Just look at the string of pathetic excuses and weasel words every time Amazon's services go down about how you should have used redundant something-or-other and different availability-wotsits, and then look at how many businesses either hadn't understood this or hadn't wanted to spend the extra money or simply hadn't done it yet and wound up offline as a result. I defy anyone to claim that the time and money to configure cloud services to be reliable per all these recommendations is harder than setting up equivalent equipment on-site or with dedicated hosting and a decent off-site backup system, assuming that you have someone who knows what they are doing in each case to do the work.
Well said. Also there is a prevailing myth that the average user cannot secure his/her data and often one hear statements that what if your laptop goes under truck? So we can protect your data better than you do. I honestly say this notion is an insult to an average end user intelligence. The fact is if you can change the light bulbs you can run a personal server. If you find it difficult put the data in an flash disk and connect to your key chain. That will be much safer than cloud services.
Powerful vested interests working to amplify this myth because in the end you get a indentured customer base that you can fleece for years.
Fundamentally, there is no need for a lot of these ideas to be complicated. There is no reason we couldn't have home server/VPN software that was almost entirely plug-and-play for non-technical consumers, and which was still built on robust and well-understood technologies so the geeks could easily support it.
I believe the main reason we don't have that already is that the cloud computing PR machine stole the developer mindshare first. The kind of people who might have started companies to cater to the market I described above have instead started companies based on cloud technologies.
But there is no technical reason I shouldn't be able to run a simple installer on any home computer that sets up, say, a simple mail store and an IMAP server so all my devices can connect to it. There is no reason we couldn't have GUIs no more complicated than today's e-mail or calendar or IM software to configure fetching your mail or planning events and sharing invitations with friends/colleagues. There's no reason, aside from obnoxious DRM schemes perhaps, that we couldn't have a one-click-installed home media server that can act as a hub for your music/video/streaming pay-per-view/whatever content.
The technology to do all of these things is basically already there, it's just too often the case that it only runs on one OS, or requires messing around with a command line and text configuration files to set it up, or requires figuring out an absurd amount of technical details from 57,249 half-complete README files and three-year-old HOWTOs.
I'm actually a little surprised that Microsoft hasn't fought back against the on-line/cloud push, where it has been utterly destroyed by the likes of Google and shows no signs of resurrecting itself any time soon, with a comprehensive bring-your-own-cloud campaign that emphasized things like security, flexibility and reliability where the cloud hasn't exactly lived up to its own hype. They already had the required dominance on the desktop and in the business software market, and I can't help thinking that if they had tried to out-Blackberry a severely weakened RIM by offering a solid business product range instead of launching one underwhelming consumer phone after another, the mobile device market would look very different today. And once MS had the brand and credibility at business level, it would have the experience to attack consumer space from a position of strength, and the warchest needed to acquire a few key on-line/mobile players to help that move. But what do I know? I'm sure Windows 8 and the Surface (whatever that brand means this week) will be much more successful. ;-)
If you can figure out facebook timeline, twitter hash tags and dropbox sync you can figure out personal server too. If there is a will there is a way. All you need is awareness.
If you find running a personal server too difficult try tonido or any of those plug computers. You don't need to take my word. Just try and see. You will be pleasantly surprised.
But there is no reason we couldn't do that with a basic home or small office network, adding basic VPN functionality to allow remote access if necessary. It's not particularly difficult to set these things up today for anyone who can set up a broadband router and home wireless network. If they were the must-have technologies being promoted instead of the cloud then it would get even easier, as the people making the equipment built more user-friendly interfaces that didn't need much in the way of technical skills at all, and as ready-made server software to co-ordinate your mail or calendar or music collection or whatever became as simple as a one-click download.
My contacts? Not vital at all. My presentations? Not vital at all. My music? Not vital at all.
Somehow I suspect you'd disagree if all your contacts started getting phishing e-mails that looked like they came from you, or if you blew a million-dollar business deal because your presentation wasn't available when you visited a prospective client, or if you had thousands of dollars' worth of music that you'd spent real money on and it disappeared overnight because the service provider closed down the system or you didn't realise you couldn't transfer something between accounts or you sync'd the wrong thing the wrong way. Things like these can and do happen, but I think there's a perception of "It'll never happen to me".
Because when I figure in my time needed to configure and maintain this decent, cheap and local storage it is not that cheap anymore.
I guess you're looking at this from a personal point of view. I'm not sure it's really true even then, but I acknowledge that setting up and maintaining IT systems today does require technical skills that most home users don't have, and if your new tablet or laptop or smartphone ships with the vendor's pet cloud services already integrated then of course that's an easier user experience since it just works (as long as you're happy to use those services and don't want any others).
I don't really buy that argument at all for businesses, though. Usually there are all kinds of gotchas if you're doing serious work in the cloud. Just look at the string of pathetic excuses and weasel words every time Amazon's services go down about how you should have used redundant something-or-other and different availability-wotsits, and then look at how many businesses either hadn't understood this or hadn't wanted to spend the extra money or simply hadn't done it yet and wound up offline as a result. I defy anyone to claim that the time and money to configure cloud services to be reliable per all these recommendations is harder than setting up equivalent equipment on-site or with dedicated hosting and a decent off-site backup system, assuming that you have someone who knows what they are doing in each case to do the work.