Wednesday 2 February 2011

Future internet services

It seems likely that Microsoft will push more to online services as its standard business model, in part to prevent piracy, but also to allow users access to their own standard home computing environment from anywhere. Imagine being able to log in to any Windows PC, anywhere worldwide, and seeing your own familiar environment, hosted at Microsoft, with your email, browser bookmarks and personal files right there as if you were at home. You pay a yearly subscription fee, plus a monthly fee depending on how much storage you're using. That's "software as a service", and they're big on that.

The Big Three in IT (Google, Microsoft and Apple) will continue to be big, but their core business will be more about servers and services available anywhere. Client software will continue to be important, but will focus on two areas: using the Big Three services to provide value, or doing without the Big Three entirely, working in a serverless, peer-to-peer network fashion.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It will be interesting to see how the internet develops.
PPS - I think there's a lot of changes ahead.

4 comments:

Charles said...

I am wary of the cloud computing model...

How do I know that I own the rights to any info stored in the Google cloud, or the Microsoft cloud, or wherever? I can't afford a lawyer to read through the end user agreement for me, and I sure can't understand those things myself...

Also: who wants to be at the whim of WiFi availability?

http://arealgoodblog.blogspot.com

John said...

That's a definite concern about cloud computing, and I would also be wary of using a fully online desktop, but I can see Microsoft pushing for that, as it's the surest way to beat piracy: retain full control of everything.

As for the whim of wifi availability, that's where asynchronous P2P services come in. You work on your own and sync with the serverless mesh when and if it becomes available. Neither way is really perfect, but since when have we had perfection in IT?

Charles said...

Yeah but.... isn't the ultimate dream of cloud computing for us to be working on stripped down computers that essentially serve only as web browsers? We don't pay for anything but internet and the most basic of hardware, all the processing happens elsewhere....

along those lines, are you familiar with the cloud gaming system "OnLive?"

John said...

That depends on who you ask. "Cloud" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For instance, to some people it means only the server side, using virtual servers and flexible capacity to meet demands rather than everyone using their own physical server. And, yes, to some it means you don't really own your software, nor really possess it. I don't think of that as a great move, but I do see it catching on, and I see its appeal to software publishers.

As for OnLive, I'm aware of it, but I thought it was more like Steam. I see from some quick research that I'm wrong about that. Does it work, streaming just the video and sound to your PC/console over the web? What about twitchy FPSes? If your frame rate dips just a little bit, then boom, headshot, you're dead.