Google| Subject | Re: Adobe's Low hanging .... ? |
| From | Mayayana |
| Date | 07/12/2014 16:13 (07/12/2014 10:13) |
| Message-ID | <lprfkg$5nu$1@dont-email.me> |
| Client | |
| Newsgroups | rec.photo.digital |
| Follows | Sandman |
| Followups | Tony Cooper (1h & 9m) nospam (13h & 12m) > Mayayana Sandman (1d & 4m) > Mayayana |
| >It's obviously a fad. That's not in question. Whether | >cloud is an improvement or not, and whether it's a good plan for | >companies, is a hot topic. | | I thought a "fad" was something that was temporary and a lot of people | hyped when it wasn't as great as they thought. | | I.e. I only thought "fad" could be applied to something that has passed, | and not something that is currently being acclaimed by lots of people. |
Fad. Fashion. Craze. I think you're right about the definition, but it doesn't have to be past. It's just that people in the heat of the craze (I'm not naming names, but nospam :) don't see it as a fad when it's happening.
I don't see that the fad has to be connected to the result. In other words, hula hoops were a fad in the 60s and midi dresses were a fad in the 80s. PCs were a fad in 2000. None of them are gone now. None of them were entirely pointless. They're just not current fads now.
So what I was getting at is that cloud is a fad -- cloud being basically synonymous with online services -- that's being heavily hyped, mostly by companies that are trying to find new profits, and by lapdog media who want to keep their advertisers happy. Cloud has happened in large part because we finally have fast Internet connections, but also because we now have the computer power and software that we need, which has slowed the market. If people are content with their tools they won't buy new ones.
The spooks also have an interest in cloud. If everyone conducts their lives through commercial cloud services then government spy beancounters have a very easy job.
So cloud is being oversold for various reasons: The possibility of new markets, of increased software profits, of controlling markets via lock-in, and due to the interests of government surveillance fetishists.
But that's not to say that everything cloud is destined to be short-lived. I was trying to emphasize the distinction: The hype as opposed to the actual thing. The media says you want lots of cloud now -- for fun and profit. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google are all hoping to lock in as many people as possible to as many cloud services as possible, through as many devices as possible. So the tablet fad is also part of that. Companies want to get people stuck in a new kind of pervasive walled garden.
I think the culture at large is in the process of working out what role cloud services have. Maybe the Internet will turn into interactive cable TV where you do most of your daily activities, and you'll have to pick one provider due to incompatibilities. On the other hand, maybe Dropbox and Facebook and Amazon will be gone in 10 years, and as with midi dresses in the 80s, people will wonder what they were thinking in paying so much money for tablets and ebooks. The landscape may change in unforseeable ways. After all, who would have predicted that when Steve Case sold AOL to Time Warner he was actually dropping a hot potato, and a rotten one at that? At that time it looked like the Internet was a money machine waiting to be tapped, and I'd guess the people at TW thought they were visionaries, out ahead of the pack. It turned out the visionary was Steve Case. He apparently saw the haze clearing and knew it was time to get out.
The only certain thing, to my mind, is that numerous drooling, ravenous companies, led by people with little vision beyond making a buck and/or satisfying their own vanity, will continue to work at trying to grab as big a piece of the Internet pie for themselves as they can get for as long as the market is in flux. And they don't much care what the pie is. Business cloud? Apps and tablets? Social networking? Whatever. Who cares as long as "we" win in the market?
The new head of Microsoft just announced their new theme: "Mobile first, cloud first". Mobile provides justification for cloud. The only problem is that Microsoft really doesn't do much of either. Their old, brand new motto was "We're a devices and services company". Both mottos really say the same thing, but the new new motto is tastefully vague. They don't have to show that anyone is buying Nokia phones or Surface tablets if they just say "mobile" instead of "devices". But who cares, really? That's where the pack is running now. So Microsoft is running there, too. They're all too busy growling and grabbing and flashing their teeth to think straight. And technology is changing so fast that I, at least, can't see where it's going.
07/10/2014-
