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Technology Forecast: A "Cloudy" Future Ahead

"There's no doubt that Apple understands that more and more ... services are going to be cloud-based and they need different devices to be able to access them," says Gartenberg. "Maybe that's what we're seeing (with) the beginning of in the iPhone. But I don't think that in five years there will be no Macintosh." Wired News: IPhone: Calling the Future

This excellent article from Wired magazine makes a critical point and raises more strategic issues surrounding the announcement by Apple of its iPhone: a new mobile platform that is at once a video iPod, cellular phone, and Wi Fi enabled PDA.

The bottom line: as computing capacity grows and size shrinks, we will be carrying more and more power in our pockets, and those devices will be connected to WAN and LAN environments.

As you might expect, I read such articles as this through a metropolitan broadband lense and I enjoy the future they predict. Clouds are such an apt metaphor for the capabilities that wireless networks bring. But in this case, clouds are a positive, not a negative.

I actually took a Meteorology course way back when in Undergrad (back in the 1970s!), and I can remember the nomenclature of clouds and what they can tell us about weather. Now we have a new set of clouds gathering on the horizon, coming our way: WANs, WLANs, MANs, PANs. Hot Spots are clouds, hovering over your corner coffee shop. Home wireless LANs are clouds, inside my house, over my couch. And metropolitan broadband networks are clouds, sitting over a city, like the cloud of fog that creeps up from Lake Austin on a cold morning like today, shrouding the highway only to dissipate with the rising sun.

So when this forecast has clouds in store, think puffy Cumulus clouds that you watch while laying on your back on a picnic blanket with your loved one. Think of those soft clouds you fly through on your way to a vacation in the Bahamas. A cloudy future generally means a future that is uncertain, full of risks and unknowns. We can't see because the clouds block the way. The vision is of storm clouds, bringing danger, destruction, death. Picture Hurricane Katrina churning in the Gulf of Mexico, about to wreak havoc on New Orleans.

But for once, the more pleasant alternative is operative in this case. From a consumer perspective, our particular "cloudy" future with regard to wireless applications is rosy, with picnics ahead, not storms.

Posted on February 16, 2007 at 08:24 AM

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