Skydrive?

So, Microsoft will have to rename Skydrive...
BBC News - Microsoft made to rename Skydrive after BSkyB victory:

Makes me chuckle, and to some extent mad... No one would confuse Sky (the TV network) and Skydrive. Really.

If this were IBM, this could never have happened; they'd have clled it  'DDSF' from the start - as in 'Dislocated Data Storage Facility' :)

Why handset manufacturers love cloud storage

In the last couple of weeks, every new Smartphone seems to come with cloud storage attached, e.g. the 25GB you get with HTC - as announced in Barcelona earlier this year.
I think there are good reasons for the manufacturers to prefer cloud storage over SD slots/cards:

• A SD increases the cost of the device - not by a lot, but still.


• It imposes physical restrictions on the design, because the SD slot it obviously has to be accessible.


• Preferable not hidden behind the battery, otherwise you will get bad reviews


• The capacity of the SD card will for some weird reasons affect reviews, too. If you only include 8GB of SD storage, reviewers will tell their readers to get some other smartphone with 16GB... If you include a too large SD card it will drive up cost and price...


• Also, if a customer decides to replace his SD card with a larger one, the phone manufacturer will not see any revenue from it, but SanDisk and others will.

However, going for cloud storage

• will have no impact on the manufacturing cost


• will not impose any design restrictions


• and you can upsell your users to higher capacity and make mony from it.

So, no wonder they love cloud storage.

Finally, Google Drive

The long rumored Google drive is finally here.

To keep it short: it is basically DropBox, just with some Google Docs integration... or rather, Google Docs is - once you sign up for Google Drive - replaced by it.

Therefore, in addition to DropBox you will get all your Google docs mirrored to your local folder as well. And you start with 5GB free.

"Real" Google Docs (like sheet, draw, ...) are represented as their own file type, e.g. .gsheet, .gdoc, .gslides ... and are only synchronized as a link to the web application, instead of a OpenDocument or Office file.
Well, at least some integration.

All other file types from Google Docs (like .pdf etc) are fully synced in their native format.

On Mobile, Apps and the Cloud

The other day I heard about a bartender app for Android that seems to only have a lot of drink recipes and some tips&tricks.
So basically this is a book(let) made into an app.
Yawn.

Why are so many phone and tablet apps just stupid books or references?

Dear developer, you have a full phone/tablet at your disposal, meaning:

• you know where you are (location)
• you have the time, date, durations, ...
• you have (more or less) full internet connectivity

So, e.g., for a cooking app, don't just tell me to do something for 5 minutes, start a freaking timer, and tell me when those 5 minutes are over!

With internet connectivity  you have unlimited compute power, currently called "the cloud". 

So please use it.

And not just by providing storage in the cloud (as cool as the HTC/DropBox deal is), use it for real computing.

Also, while we are at it: I venture a prediction:

Within less then 12 months, we will not only get free cloud storage with our phone, there will also be offerings for a free cloud-hosted virtual machine with your tablet.

So then, you'll get your Windows 7 or 8 PC as a VM and just use it from your tablet.

I'm pretty confident on this.

HTC got it

Kudos to HTC.

In Barcelona they announced that with each of their new Android smartphones - of the HTC One series - customers get 25GB of storage on DropBox.

They did not go for an HTC Cloud Storage, but decided to cooperate with DropBox. Good. Because DropBox has apps, users, APIs, ...

I wonder how the HTC internal IT guys fought this decision ("we can do this ourselves").

Good for you, HTC.

Excellent presentation on Cloud Computing

Ok, this is a bit old (OSCON 09) but still easily the most fun and solid presentation about Cloud Computing:


Found it via the IT Conversations podcast.

iCloud

Apple's just announced  multimedia cloud storage thingy, iCloud[1] looks like a real threat to Dropbox.
Especially if well integrated into the Apple ecosystem (Mac, iOS and applications).

Not for me, though; the 2GB Dropbox offers for free are sufficient for me... but thats only because I do not keep music or photos/videos there..

Also Dropbox will probably always be more cross-platform.

So I'll keep using Dropbox - and invite you to do the same.

--
[1]  if they can keep the name :-)

Cloud rants

With the outage of the Amazon S3 storage about two weeks ago  and the downtime of the Playstation Network (PSN) due to security problems, the cloud sceptics are on the rise again.

The usual “we told you so” and “the cloud is not safe”... etc etc.

Two thoughts on this

1. Show me one internal IT operation that has an availability or up-time like S3.
2. If people would only spend the right amount of money on the cloud services and subscribe to the full package with proper redundancies, etc etc this would probably not happen.
   Well, the single outage at one Amazon site will still happen, but not the same net effect on all the other services.

I guess one of the reasons is, that IT managers or CxOs compare the cheapest price they find on the brochures for the cloud services with their internal (total) cost. And then tend to buy only the cheapest flavor of whatever cloud service they want, without any consideration regarding availability (don't even get me started on security).

Like at least one IT manager who I heard complaining how expansive 1 TB of storage is in an enterprise grade storage box (or even in a SAN) when they can get 1TB for roughly 50€ as a USB disk...