There’s no doubt that we live our lives in the cloud more than ever, especially with email. Google have been largely responsible for that even though ‘cloud computing’ has been around in some form since the first days of mail services from Microsoft and Yahoo!
With Windows 7 there’s a further push towards the clouds, albeit an incredibly subtle one, with the removal of programs like Windows Mail, and with programs like Live Photo Gallery offering up internet publishing options.
Google Chrome OS, some people have been saying, marks the death of the ‘traditional’ operating system. That, essentially, things will never be the same.
I disagree, and not just to be pedantic. It’s an idealistic dream to be able to store everything, our photos and files, up in the clouds so that we have instant access to them wherever we are.
But the simple fact is that people still store their photos on their PCs and only use services such as Facebook and Flickr for sharing the ‘select best’, and that Google Docs is not much more popular are testament to the simple fact that the infrastructure is not yet good enough, and won’t be for some years.
People simply don’t trust that they will be able to get a stable web connection, or any connection at all come to that, when they need it. They need instant access to their files and for now, the best way to guarantee that is to store them on their hard drives.
Wi-Max will do a lot to redress this, but mass rollout of this fantastic new technology is still several years away.
The repercussions for Microsoft and Windows 8 are going to be huge. I don’t believe that Google is going to shove Microsoft off the desktops of millions of users any day soon, even though many PC manufacturers have already said they’re happy to ship computers with Chrome OS pre-installed, you can read the full article here. If anything, Linux systems will be hit hardest.
However we can now expect Microsoft to begin pulling together their cloud-based systems and prototypes (it’s taken them long enough, let’s face it) and get ready to stand up to Google. If they don’t they’re in big trouble.
