'We are going to move the centre of your digital life into the cloud'

Having attended several "cloud" seminars in the past four years, and written several articles and columns about the same, Mackline now has a sense that the game is about to change.

The New Zealand Government is moving to cloud computing services as it looks to streamline its public sector back-office functions.

By having government departments in the cloud, the Government expects to shave millions of dollars off its IT bill.

The last time Mackline attended a cloud presentation, Microsoft was the enthusiastic promoter of the concept in which your data is not held on your hard drive.

Instead, it is held on a server owned by someone else and which might not even be in New Zealand.

Anyone with a Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo! email account already has data on the cloud.

The next big step is getting businesses to trust someone else with storing their data.

If the Government makes a move in that direction, albeit only using New Zealand-based servers, businesses will be tempted.

Last week, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs got out of his sick bed to declare that personal computers were no longer the central hub of people's digital lives.

Mr Jobs unveiled the company's new online storage and syncing service for music, photos, files and software.

The new, free service, iCloud, will simplify how people manage content and apps across devices, and end the PC-centric era of computing, he says.

It will automatically store on Apple's servers many of the new files that a person loads on to a Mac, iPad or iPhone, making those files available on any other Apple device owned by the same person.

People will no longer have to manually sync mobile devices with their PCs, an approach Mr Jobs said had become too unruly now that millions of people owned music players, smartphones and tablets - each with photos, music, apps and other types of documents.

"Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy. We have a great solution for this problem. We are going to demote the PC to just being a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the centre of your digital life, into the cloud.

"Everything happens automatically and there is nothing new to learn," he said at the launch.

Hooray. Mackline never ever gets the best out of devices because the writer cannot be bothered to spend the time trying to sync several devices at night after a day in the office. For ages, I wished I had the patience of my children who transfer music and videos at whim.

Now, Apple has made this big move, others will follow and Mackline will welcome the help.

In the last decade, Apple made the US99c download the standard unit of music sales. Now, Apple is poised to try a second transformation, enticing music fans to store songs online in the cloud instead of on a hard drive.

If the company's iCloud helps persuade the masses to embrace cloud-based services, that could help reverse more than a decade of sliding music sales.

That's a big "if", however, and much depends on the labels' willingness to change. Given the pulling power of Apple, and the sliding music sales, the chances of a major shift are highly likely.

At the centre of iCloud is the new version of iTunes that will allow users to download on any device any song they have ever bought. That is a powerful incentive.

While all this was happening, Microsoft gave the world a sneak preview of its successor to Windows 7, a next-generation operating system designed to work on both PCs and touchscreen tablets.

"Windows 8" builds on many of the features in Microsoft's latest mobile operating system for smartphones - Windows Phone 7 - including the use of touch tiles instead of icons to launch and navigate between applications.

In a blog post, Julie Larson-Green, corporate vice-president of Windows Experience, said Windows 8 was a re-imaging of Windows.

"A Windows 8-based PC is really a new kind of device, one that scales from touch-only small screens through to large screens, with or without a keyboard and mouse."

Microsoft plans to reveal more features of Windows 8, which uses Internet Explorer as a web browser, at its developers conference in Anaheim, California, which starts on September 13.

Windows powers most of the world's PCs but the Redmond-based software giant has been slow to enter a fast-growing tablet market dominated for the moment by Apple's iPad.

Many other tablet makers have opted to use Google's Android software but a well-formed Windows 8 is likely to pose serious problems to Android.

While iPad is expected to remain the tablet market leader, Microsoft will be a contender by having a product that can compete across all devices.

 

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