Looking through the daily technology articles on the 'The New York Times' I came across this very interesting article by Nick Bilton titled 'Apple Looks to a New Computing Era'.
Recently, Steve Jobs presented the new MacBook Air and mentioned that these new 'Macbook Air' line will be the next generation in laptops. What he essentially means is that future Mac laptops or desktops will no longer have DVD or CD drives! They will be replaced by the iCloud where users will store all their videos, music, photos and important documents.
Apple has a lot at stake, by being one of the first to move into this space. Also Steve Jobs is very aware that there are many players eagerly waiting to get into this potential high-revenue space and no better than Google (which has essentially grown up in the cloud and created integrated services).
Last week it was reported by Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO, that they are ready to open a 500,000 sq-foot data center in North Carolina, worth $1bn, any day now which will act as the data storage for the iCloud. But Apple is being cautious about this launch, due its previous disaster of launching 'MobileMe'. Once this data center is launched, don't be suprised to find any number of cloud-based applications on your ipod, iphones and ipads!
What is most interesting is that we are at the brink of a major technology change which will once again change the landscape for technology and businesses. Personal storage will no longer be on our laptops but on data centres located in far off locations and maybe in different countries and continents. This does bring upto the issue of security but then nowdays how secure is the information we post on facebook or other social websites?
Look at this in the context of the growing competition between some of the players we discussed in the class. Now Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon (and potentially Facebook) all compete and cooperate. iCloud is a logical evolution as the bandwidth allows us to access without delay (and frustration). This will be a big part of Apple's strategy in 2011.
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