Head in the cloud

[madfilkentist]

I've been seeing ads lately for "personal cloud" products. This gives me the impression of being a solution in search of a problem. People often have several computing devices in their homes, but how many really need servers that dynamically allocate resources as needed (which is what a "cloud" does)? More often they want all the resources to be

Comments

[darcy807]

A couple years ago in the middle of that big Microsoft campaign my brother's mother-in-law actually said "I gotta get this cloud thing. What is that?" :-}

[paradoox]

Are they actually pitching personal cloud computing or just cloud storage?

I can see the need for cloud storage. Sometimes it would be nice to access my files from anywhere. And I'm not convinced Google Docs fills that niche. Among other things their formats are somewhat non-standard.

As to cloud computing, I'm wondering if the move to tablets and ipads and such is driving this. There is only so much you can do on an ipad.

[madfilkentist]

As I understand the term, remotely accessible storage doesn't count by itself as "cloud storage."

In a talk I went to yesterday, three types of cloud services were distinguished: infrastructure, platform, and software. Google Docs is a software cloud service, and cloud storage would be an "infrastructure" service. The distinctive feature of clouds in general is dynamic allocation of capacity of whatever kind among clients, and I don't see much need for that at the personal level.

We used to call that "time-sharing services" when we were young, didn't we?

[stevemb]

They'd probably be better off coming up with a new term and "branding" it as a way to get the advantages of "the cloud" without the risk of being cut off from it.