The battle for the future of the Open Web is taking place as a new document model merges into a platform for highly graphical, interactive and information rich applications. Open source communities vie with dominant vendors Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Nokia and Google to stake out their claims as open source innovations collide with standards consortia and proprietary alternatives.
Check out the "Write" document editing and collaboration portion of this iCloud demo video. "Write" is designed to be compatible with MSWord 97-2003. It's simple editing, but the collaboration is very cool. iCloud calls the technique a shared "drop zone". A colleague is invited via instant messaging to share a drop zone. This results in a split screen displaying two iCloud desktops. The Write document is then dragged and dropped by the author into this drop zone, creating two instances of the document.
there are a number of "virtual desktop" variations. I guess the first level of vd would be the Citrix, VMWare, Microsoft class of a virtual OS running within a native OS window. A second level of vd would be that of desktop productivity application suites running on a Web server and delivered to a desktop through a browser with "data" having to be managed, uploaded and synced separately. A third level would be cloud virtual desktops/OS where the local folders of data and documents are synced to a Web server, and full productivity application suites and services are delivered entirely through a Web browser.
iCloud is in this third level of cloud based virtual desktop/OS. iCloud applications and services compete with the Google and Zoho productivity platform, Microsoft BPOS, Stoneware WebOS, and Glide OS in that they offer a full suite of alternative cloud based applications and services similar to the legacy Windows desktop productivity suite of integrated applications and services.
iCloud also competes with cloud based storage services such as DropBox and Box.net. Like Box.net, iCloud offers an easy to use right-click method for uploading, syncing and sharing any local file folder. Where Box.net seems to aim for the Web Document and Content Management market sector, iCloud clearly targets this emerging concept of a cloud based desktop.
One last point of interest concerning iCloud is the API and global inclusiveness demonstrated by the developer community behind iCloud. The basic challenge facing the Web cloud-computing model is that of provisioning a Web productivity platform with the internal messaging and data connections that applications ans services need to exchange information. The legacy Windows desktop productivity environment featured internal technologies like copy/paste, DDE, OLE, ODBC, MAPI, ActiveX and now the .NET-WPF generation of Silverlight controls. A Web Productivity Platform initiative has to provisions for a similar internal messaging and connectivity if it's to be an effective replacement for the aging Windows productivity environment anchored by MSOffice.
It's often been said that the name of the game in Silicon Valley has always been "platform". As SalesForce.com's CEO Marc Benioff pointed out in a Q&A with Tim Anderson, there comes a point in time when customers of a platform vendor start writing their business processes to that system. When this happens, they are committing to that platform for the long haul. It's one thing to move data and documents, and another to move a business process bound to platform specific applications and internal messaging services.
In fact, this is the lesson of Massachusetts. It wasn't converting the MSOffice binary documents that stopped ODF. The problem is Reuter's Rule; conversion breaks documents. And it does so in two important ways; fidelity and internal process logic.
Years of Windows desktop productivity development and the critical day-to-day use of business processes based on client/server compound documents, forms and reports established MSOffice as the anchor of many a workgroup environment. These compound documents are the fuel of local windows desktop productivity bound business systems. Convert the compound documents, and you break the business process.
If conversion fidelity had been the only issue, ODF would have easily succeeded! But as Massachusetts discovered, breaking a business process is very disruptive and costly. No matter how sincere and willing a workforce, if they can't get their work done any kind of transition to a newer, faster, cheaper, better system will fail.
iCloud is clearly worth watching. Stoneware would be my choice as the Web Productivity leader primarily because of their attention to the transition phase of moving business processes and systems from the Windows desktop to the Web. They have really given some serious thought to easing the disruptive cost entailed.
Google of course has some clear advantages. Like gMail, gVoice, gDocs, gMaps and a scalable cloud-computing expertise and infrastructure to die for. They have loosely integrated applications and services that hopefully will come together some day. Native Client "Web" conversion of legacy C and C++ code, and Chrome OS are truly exciting. Most of all though Google has a profit model beyond the reach of anyone else excepting perhaps a Facebook-Microsoft coalition.
Total mobile data traffic topped mobile voice traffic in the United States last year, for the first time.
In fact, globally, data traffic (that includes SMS text messaging) topped voice traffic on a monthly basis last year and the total traffic across the world exceeded an exabyte for the first time in 2009, according to a report just released by Chetan Sharma Consulting, a leading strategist in the mobile industry (clients include AT&T and China Mobile).
I left a lengthy comment on this very good article.
excerpt: According to the latest study from Juniper Research, the market for cloud-based mobile applications will grow 88% from 2009 to 2014. The market was just over $400 million this past year, says Juniper, but by 2014 it will reach $9.5 billion. Driving this growth will be the adoption of the new web standard HTML5, increased mobile broadband coverage and the need for always-on collaborative services for the enterprise.
Cloud Apps in your Pocket
Mobile cloud computing is a term that refers to an infrastructure where both the data storage and the data processing happen outside of the mobile device from which an application is launched. To the typical consumer, a cloud-based mobile application looks and feels just like any app purchased or downloaded from a mobile application store like iTunes. However, the app is driven from the "cloud," not from the handheld device itself. There are already a few well-known mobile cloud apps out there including Google's Gmail and Google Voice for iPhone. When launched via iPhone homescreen shortcuts, these apps perform just like any other app on the iPhone, but all of their processing power comes from the cloud.
In the future, there will be even more applications like these available, but they won't necessarily be mobilized web sites like those in Google's line-up. Cloud-based mobile apps are perfectly capable of being packaged in a way that allows them to be sold alongside traditional mobile apps in mobile application stores, with no one but the developers any wiser.
HTML5 Paves the Way for Mobile Web's Future
to map out ideas, organize with outlines and collaborate online with teams or colleagues. Webspiration unleashes your creativity, strengthens organizational skills, and transforms your ideas and information into knowledge.
We're happy to announce that over the next few weeks we will be rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. With this change, you'll be able to upload and access your files from any computer -- all you need is an Internet connection.
Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.
Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.
