Loading ...It’s official (and somewhat obvious, really) — cloud computing is on the rise. Tasks that used to be relegated to the desktop are finding new homes in the cloud, from document creation and media sharing, to running entire companies.
And with that, there’s been a corresponding effort to produce cheaper, feature-limited hardware that relies on the cloud for processing power and data storage. Throw in wireless networking and constantly-improving battery technology, and it becomes easy to believe that the future is online and mobile.
So much so that people are starting to propagate the idea that the era of the desktop PC may be coming to an end. A doomsayer proposition that I don’t really agree with.
See, in the last 20 years, computers haven’t gotten faster, contrary to popular belief. They’ve gotten more powerful, and with that increased power, comes increased demand for applications that utilise it. Which then increases the demand for power, and so the loop goes.
(Said loop may be drawing to an end soon — Moore’s Law is coming up against the limitations of semiconductor manufacturing techniques.)
Despite all the functions and tasks that have been taken into the cloud, there are a whole lot that remain resolutely at home. Or at the office. To better understand this, it helps to break down the internet into three basic user types — the Consumer, the Creator, and the Provider.
Consumers do pretty much just that — consume the available services. This includes everyone from regular surfers, right up to bloggers who use prebuilt platforms like Blogger or Wordpress. They’re doing nothing more than making use (and maybe personalising) stuff that already exists — and this includes creating content to post online (photos, videos, cartoons, posts, etc).
The exception (for there is always one) is the gamer. Not the Flash-based browser game gamer, but the PC or Xbox or PS3 gamer. The gamer with hardware that draws parallels with current-generation desktop machines. They’re Consumers, sure, but they’re very high demand consumers, consumers that aren’t likely to be satisfied with playing streaming versions of World of Warcraft, or Just Cause 2 running on a server halfway around the world. The internet just doesn’t have the capacity for that yet.
For the majority of consumers, then, cloud computing makes sense. Less hardware, less cost, same functions — great!
For Creators, not so much. People that code, design, animate, test, these are people that need much more out of their hardware. They need lightning-fast compile and render times, they need the data to be there 101% of the time, they need the full resources of whatever devices are available to them, to meet the ever-growing demands of the real world.
Imagine if they tried rendering James Cameron’s Avatar remotely, using cloud computing. Yeah, I’m not seeing it happen either.
Creators will always need greater computing power in order to create the services that consumers use. Imagine if Facebook, for instance, tried building and maintaining its platform using nothing but cloud-based tools accessed over low-cost netbooks. With present standards and capabilities, I can’t imagine that working so well.
(Or maybe it would, since it would result in far fewer layout and feature changes. But you get the idea.)
Then there are the Providers — that elite clan of administrators and technicians and server owners that keep the pipes connected and the wheels turning. They’re the people ensuring that the cloud even exists at all, and can’t rely on the services they’re maintaining, to maintain the services they’re supposed to be maintaining.
They, too, will need powerful and very available hardware and software — and that’s apart from the dedicated servers that serve the cloud. Low-powered netbooks with nothing more than internet access just won’t cut it for them.
So the further we push the internet, the cloud, ubiquitous access and computer literacy, the more we’ll create markets that need high-end processing power in the home and office, and the cheaper those products will get.
In my opinion, neither option — cloud nor desktop — is capable of solving all the computing and sharing needs of the modern netizen. Each needs the other, and can’t survive without it.
That doesn’t spell the end for netbooks, though, or indeed for any mobile, low-powered computing device. Desktops, laptops, tablets, netbooks, smartphones — each fulfill a vital function, and it’s not impossible to imagine a single person owning one of each.
The future, as I see it, won’t be a single, dramatic shift towards dumb terminals and the cloud. Rather, it’ll be a converged, cloud-driven experience across multiple devices, which will vary from case to case, and individual to individual, according to their needs.
The devices themselves will become much more refined, too. As the internet becomes capable of serving more information to more people in faster and more stable ways, new applications open up — and greater demands will be placed on hardware, processing power and storage on the end user’s side.
Already there are functioning demonstrations of augmented reality technology — possibly the next great frontier in personal computing. A frontier that’ll be pretty tricky to navigate without some serious computing power and data storage on hand.
In short, and as far as I see it, desktop PCs are here to stay, and for quite a while, too. But there is room in this world for netbooks and tablets too. At least, for those of us that don’t live at our desks.
- None
I can accept your conclusions but I take issue with your estimate of how fast the cloud side will come on and take over some aspects of what we do.
Movie rendering and CAD are already going that way.
Gaming will go that way with huge dividends opening up more power to gamers than was power locally and more collaboration. Augmented reality would seem to be primarily a cloud task and a local compression decompression task.
I think its is for political leverage reasons that the local systems will survive but I don’t expect local mediums like plastic disk to survive.
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