Comments on: The cloud is not a computer

Some computing processes work better when left on the ground.

[antonbar]

This is an interesting opinion :-)

I have a comment about Web OS in general and G.ho.st in particular. IMHO a new concept such as web OS takes time to grow roots. Take a look at Windows 1.0 ,back then it wasn't clear it's going to take off either.

Since the 70s the OS concept hasn't changed a single bit - we are still walled into a single physical computer that we have to back up, upgrade and secure in order to keep our precious software, settings and data safe.

Recently things began to change and today we have many Web 2.0 apps that become more and more useful. Still you have to remember many different URLs, logins, passwords and, most importantly, these apps do not collaborate at all.

Take the example of Google - when you compose an email on Gmail you cannot browse, choose and attach a document from Google Docs, and these apps some from the same provider!

According to Go2Web20.net there are thousands of Web2.0 services. Do they have an open API? (only a few). Can they collaborate? (most of them cannot). Do they support open community standards? (each one its own)...

That's where G.ho.st comes in handy - it's designed to provide a common layer of open APIs based on open community standards such as WebDAV, OpenSAM, OAuth, OpenID etc. that will allow many distributed an heterogeneous apps to collaborate simply and efficiently.

I would give it a chance :-)

[RMarch]

How quickly people forget. Ray Ozzie has been preaching for years that a blended approach of local resources and OS combined with cloud services is the path forward. This has been a consistent message from him since 2004 (years and years before the delivery of Mesh which is just the realization of this message). Back then, people claimed he did not get it and was hanging on to the Windows franchise. Literally everything was going to be "software as service" and the desktop and OS were obsolete. It was rubbish then and it is still today.

For the forseable future (i.e. 10 - 15 years out), local resources and OS will be critical to delivery of anything we would consider progress in software. Blending this with cloud resources will deliver a very rich and transportable experience.

As to Midori being purely a "cloud OS" maybe the exercise is or is not, but Ray Ozzie is at the center and controls the direction of MS (including Mesh, Midori, etc.). If you look at all his comments since taking over as Chief architect for MS in 2004 through today, it is clear that he strongly believes in a blended (local and cloud) approach to delivering software as service. Any commercialization of Midori will surely be practically grounded to allow for the exploitation of powerful local resources (mobile, or otherwise) deeply integrated with cloud resources.

If you listen, MS (Ray specifically) has been preaching this for the past 4 years.

[rafe]

@RMarch: Yes. I didn't get the whole "hybrid" thing that MS was pitching at first. I thought they were trying to hang on to the Windows architecture as long as they could. But actually it makes sense. In theory, anyway.

I still hate to see it when apps -- like the Office suite -- don't take advantage of the Web for cheap (or free) collaboration, though. Google Apps' real-time group editing simply blows MS out of the water both in capability and ease of use (compared to Sharepoint). And it's totally free.

[Carbonic2]

Not on the main point, but it's no mystery why Apple is not providing cut-and-paste, or a Bluetooth keyboard profile, or any way of syncing notes. They are intentionally crippling the iPhone to make it difficult to use it as a laptop replacement for road warriors, calculating their losses in laptop sales when people realized it was practical. Making long text entry and editing impractical is not an oversight.

[rwarfel]

"... illustrates that while the Web can be employed to do a lot of things that we've formerly thought of as belonging solely in the domain of local computing, it doesn't mean we should do so. ..."

Boy, I wish every developer would take just a second to think about that statement before deciding their application is a should be web-based.
Porous solutions (e.g. AJAX) to performance-based issues with complex user interfaces are better solved on the desktop (although deployment of the app could be via the web). Even the cross-platform quandary is easily solved using one of the many downloadable runtime interpreters (flash, silverlight, even java and now JavaFX). I can hear the screams now. Let us not forget where the precious RIA's run. They are nothing more than a glitzy basic program with superior UI and network resource support.

[Lerianis]

The reason that they didn't put a copy and paste on the iPhone is simple: they figured that most people would be writing e-mails and text messages and therefore would not NEED a copy and paste function on their iPhone.
This isn't a case of 'simple oversight'. It's a case where Apple reasonably said "Who in the world would need a copy and paste function on a cellular phone or even webphone?" The answer: no one that I know of, bubu.