The Battle fought in the clouds....Who will win??

I always thought clouds were in the sky....but apparently these days they involve computers. The concept is known as cloud computing and according to infoworld.com is best 'described as "sky computing," with many isolated clouds of services which IT customers must plug into individually.' So what exactly does this mean? My good friend Wikipedia helped me out by explaining Cloud Computing as 'the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network.' In layman's terms this basically we means we can access data, content, apps etc without any fundamental knowledge or need of understanding how we get it. Pretty awesome right? 





Now the problem is which cloud do we choose? This is where Apple, Google and too a lesser extent Microsoft come to the party. Each one is trying to predict the future of the internet by tapping into the concept of cloud computing. What is interesting though is that each is doing it in a rather different way. Apple is continuing to utilise the closed system and walled apps, maintaining complete control over their systems and users. Google on the other hand continues to promote the open source and free platform, providing a huge amount of freely designed apps and with no control over users or content. So what does that mean for us as users? 


Basically it comes down to a choice of the user. According to Hiner Google's focus on the cloud is based heavily on the future and that the internet will be highly accessible and extremely fast, thus allowing access to Google's large cloud of apps, content and innovation. In contrast Apple sees the cloud as a train station, ensuring everything runs on efficiently and on time and everything operates as it should. In this way they are continuing their use of synching, so that data can be on all of the users devices. In my view Google's cloud is trying to be a massive toy shop, containing a huge range of cool stuff you can get, but it seems like it would be very chaotic. For some reason seeing images of shoppers rushing into Myers at 6am on the morning of a sale comes to mind. Apple's cloud on the other hand seems to keep the reliance on the device and that seems to be the main idea, not that of the cloud. Which do you think will win??





On a side note I've only just got a smartphone (A hand me down iPhone 3G...yep old school) and I quite like it. It's easy to use, does everything I need, though the battery life is a bit short. My friend who gave the phone recently got a Samsung Galaxy S2, which if you don't know runs Android, and that is it quite an amazing phone. He loves it due to the amount of weird and wonderful apps he can get, the lack of syncing needed especially when transferring music, and the actual quality of the phone. Again, it's all up to personal choice. I think what Apple has done in terms of complete control is a great thing, I also thing the chance for innovation and freedom is a great thing....which is better....you decide!


Sources: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/apple-cloud-vs-google-cloud-the-philosophical-differences/8492
http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means-031?page=0,2