If you’re not embraced by cloud, soon you gonna be. There’s a huge shift from the conventional way of doing Internet and Software business. Few years ago, Internet was not really widespread in an countries in the world.
We heard of Browser war few years ago. Without any good reasons Google has started it’s Chrome browser development and the version number is changing like anything within the short period of time. Why they’re so serious about it? They’re building a platform which can acts as career to their service. Even they’ve introduced a computer which purely based on a browser and enable the users to browse Internet, Play Games (WebGL), Rich Internet content using CSS 3 and HTML5.
There are several early adopters which embraced the cloud like SalesForce, Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc. They’re the major players in this area. Amazon is basically a cloud infrastructure provider and they’re using their own technology to buildup their main business.
Few years ago the software business was really simple. Some companies will develop some Software either paid or free. They deploy it to the customer through CD/DVD and customer install and use it. The vendors provides support for a fixed period and they will introduce the next version of Software and sell it again. You’re blessed if they give some discounts on the new product.
Now the mobile devices are boomed like anything. Thanks to Apple for reinventing the Software and Hardware business. Each of the post PC devices which Apple has introduced were revolutionary. iPod changed the way people listen, organize and purchase music. Apple has reinvented the music business to a new extend. It was quite different from the previous way of selling albums and songs. User has got the freedom to buy music for cheap price and that was a good step against piracy.
iPhone has changed everything again. People have seen really smart touch devices ever since BackBerry. This is business was quite different from the way Nokia, Motorolla and other vendors did the business. Once a hardware is sold, the company has no big relation with customer other than in terms of customer. Nokia had several devices which far known for it’s spec including TV out, GPS, Maps etc. But this could not generate any money for the hardware vendor. Apple’s business model was simple straight forward and entirely new. The company has built up a world of digital content which is available for the devices they sold across the world. The app store was really good for the unknown developers and small companies to sell their product effectively. It reminds of old Dell’s strategy which allowed accessories vendors to sell their product through Dell website.
We’ve seen tablet computers in different form. Most of the time it was actually just a scaled version of a PC. None of the customizations are made for the tablets. The touch devices has changed everything and Apple made the better experience of iPhone in a better and bigger landscape. Nobody was really able to figure out what to do with the new device. But later they realized that whatever they’re doing in a PC can be done better and efficient in an iPad like social networks, photos, videos etc. Games and other apps are made use of the size available and people started making the content in the form of magazine for iPad.
A revolution has started there. The content publishers made their magazines specially for iPad. They could override the limitations in reaching the audience world wide as it’s delivered through Apple’s content distribution channel. The subscriptions were competitively priced and made available for the users.
The revolution is not really happening around tablet and mobile devices. Companies like DropBox (online File Storage), Evernote( note taking application), RememberTheMilk(task Organizer, Gmail, BaseCamp (37 signals’ project management software), Google Docs etc. are the some examples of cloud services at least for the general audience. The user computers are just acting as a view and it can be rendered across and hardware platform and form factor according to the user needs. For example, evernote has apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, PC, Mac etc. The service is synced across devices. The content is heavily depend on the server and has to make sure that device is connected online for proper synchronization.
Software and Storage as services helped the users to make their content available at server and make it available across device instead monotonously keeping in a single machine.
If you notice, the client software provided by all the services are free. No need to pay a penny but the features and services are paid. For e.g. RememberTheMilk has too many limitations for the free version. We’ve to subscribe for the pro service to get the best experience across the devices. This is a new way of doing business. Instead of getting users one time, they’re keeping them attached for long time to generate revenue. All the cloud services are heavily dependent on such business models.
But this has some disadvantages also. Companies putting high amount of subscription charges for the users. The companies like NYTimes.com are making the free content available in a PC as a premium content in Mobile and Chrome Web App. Also the services are not competitively priced. If you ask me, if I am ready to pay 100$ per for few subscription, I wont opt that because the value of money is different across countries and continents.
Your hardware gonna be light weight and heavily gonna depend on server. The other advantages of the cloud softwares are, they’re not really affected by piracy, deploying the new version of software is easy and less painful. But the cloud is the future go and embrace it.
iCloud is the going to be the next Google – (minus) Web. They’re really going to make a snapshot of digital content of this world except web. Waiting for iCloud!
