Monday November 22, 2010 – Stewart Wolpin
Joni Mitchell is going to have amend her lyrics for "Both Sides Now", adding a positive digital spin to her cynical description of clouds as mere sun blockers, indiscriminant precipitation sources and activity inhibitors.
Prior to Apple's announcement last week of The Beatles invading iTunes, most initial speculation focused on Apple unveiling a cloud iTunes service. There is likely a lot of crow being eaten by the varying prognosticating pundits, but analysts' red-faces may be only temporary.
Cloud storage is a inexorable inevitability, both for personal storage as well as for content streaming. Picasa, Flickr and their ilk already are popular repositories for our photos, while services such as Carbonite and SugarSync already are popular cloud-based U-Store-It warehouses for our data. And Cablevision got Supreme Court permission to begin network DVR service to store our recorded programs on their enormous cloud rather than our own finite home DVRs.
On the other side of the virtual sky are content cloud services. We pull TV and movie programming from the cloud via iTunes, Hulu, YouTube, Vudu, Netflix, et al. Music is streamed from cloud sources such as Pandora, Napster and Rhapsody. And as far as Apple's anticipated cloud-based iTunes service is concerned, the company is nearly ready to open a 500,000-square-foot data center in North Carolina. Even though the company hasn't discussed what the massive facility is for, speculation is rampant it will be used for cloud-based content delivery or an expansion its MobileMe cloud storage service.
The cloud won't only be used for pure storage. Earlier this week, AT&T demonstrated some startling cloud-based TV technology, including a one called iMiracle which would let you make contextual searches of cloud recorded material – searching for specific spoken phrases within a recorded program – and multi-variable voice searches of future TV programming (i.e. "comedy movies starring Woody Allen this Saturday and Sunday").
Since cloud-based storage for all our digital goods is not an if but a when, the only question is how soon local storage products such as DVRs and multi-terabyte external hard drives become both unnecessary and obsolete.
Examining how fast we moved from one form of storage to the next over the last 30 years to guestimate how quickly we move from local to sky storage won't be instructive, however.
Until now, the shift has always been simply physical media, and always to increase capacity – from the 8-inch floppy to the 3.5-inch micro floppy to the Zip drive to CD-R +/- to DVD-R +/- to solid state flash memory cards and thumb drives to portable hard drives, and the varying Moore's Law growth in hard drive memory capacity from kilobytes to megabytes to terabytes and, soon, to petabytes.
But Joni isn't the only one who really doesn't know much about clouds at all.
There's a psychological aspect to cloud storage mainstream consumers have to overcome. Not to get all metaphysical, but physical forms of media are like human consciousness – whatever we know or are is essentially trapped inside ourselves. Transferring that knowledge or experience to other folks – to transfer data from one device to another (i.e. a recorded program on a DVR or an Excel spreadsheet on your PC to a smartphone for mobile viewing/manipulation) – is an imperfect process. Just as humans deal with imperfect language, gestures and facial expressions to messily transfer knowledge or experience, in the data universe we have to deal with copy protection and formats and various wired or wireless connections, etc.
Cloud storage, however, is more akin to Star Trek's Borg, a collected consciousness. In this metaphysical context, all your devices – and anyone you designate – can easily share the same data/content because the data doesn't exist in a physical form in the cloud, at least not a physical form we can see or touch. As far as we're concerned, the photos from your last vacation are floating magically in the ether someplace, free to be viewed by us or anyone we designate on any device with access to the Internet.
And more and faster Internet access – Super WiFi or 4G cellphone networks offering data download speeds of up to 60 Mbps – will contribute to the lure of the cloud.
Therein lies the reason cloud storage will only slowly become widely adopted as a local storage replacement. Local media may be limited in capacity and not as portable as we'd like, but cloud storage seems a bit too much like alchemy – it's there, but isn't. I save my vacation photos and they go – where? Are they safe? Can someone else get at them and steal them? With a nod to Laurence Olivier's demented dentist in Marathon Man, is it safe?
So while the move to cloud storage is happening, it's happening slowly, almost too slowly to notice without time-lapse reporting. Cloud storage is a concept the mainstream consumer has yet to fully grok, which likely will keep sales of DVRs and external hard drives relatively safe – for a while.
Oh, I pulled Joni Mitchell's performance of "Both Sides Now" from – you got it – the cloud.
