Will the personal cloud bring sunshine to your life?
Steve Ballmer’s recent reference to the new PC (the personal cloud) brought back memories of Pootle in the Flumps being followed round everywhere by a gloomy cloud…strange how the memory retains some useless trivia but can fail to retain other key information!
However, the personal cloud should provide a much more positive experience than Pootle’s cloud. The cloud has undoubtedly had a massive impact on the way individuals communicate and interact, with the social networking phenomenon being dependent on hosted applications. The potential for the cloud to reach further into our lives is massive and, whilst it still feels a bit like science fiction, we can’t be too far away from our weekly shopping being automatically ordered by our fridges….and other amazing time-saving activities that will free people up to write blogs and tweets and to make virtual cyber friends!!.
As we move to a world where data is captured from everything we do and touch, the organisations that can help manage that information and disseminate it into useful, usable information will deservedly become extremely wealthy. Whilst big companies (such as Google, Apple and Microsoft) will have a huge advantage due to the size of their balance sheets, the beauty of the cloud is that winners can come from all angles creating significant opportunities for small (or currently non-existent) companies to become the next big thing.
Lets just hope that developments in green technology allow us to store and process this data with decreasing power requirements otherwise we are all in danger of being followed around by big, black “pootle-like” clouds!