Futurismic

Jonathan Zittrain explores some of the downsides of the incipient cloud computing revolution in this article at the New York Times:

If you entrust your data to others, they can let you down or outright betray you. For example, if your favorite music is rented or authorized from an online subscription service rather than freely in your custody as a compact disc or an MP3 file on your hard drive, you can lose your music if you fall behind on your payments — or if the vendor goes bankrupt or loses interest in the service.
…
The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy.
…
This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software. Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don’t like.

As useful as storing links, calandars, emails, and documents in the cloud is I like to keep local backups of all my stuff (where possible). The further threat to the decentralised innovation that has characterised software development over the last several decades is another reason to be sceptical of the benefits of the cloud.

[image from Dan Queiroz on flickr]

No, it’s not the gibberish it might initially look like. It’s an observation by Jason Stoddard who, in addition to being a damn fine science fiction writer*, runs a futurist-minded publicity agency called Centric.

Jason had a major squee over the iPhone as a platform back in March, but it would appear Google’s recently unveiled Android mobile OS has impressed him even more:

“Combine two highly capable mobile platforms, each with a sales channel for applications and significant incentives for developers to, well, develop on, and you have the beginnings of the next computing revolution. You can hear Bruce Sterling outline all the devices the mobile phone has already eaten, but the number is only going to increase in coming months.”

I can hear your objection coming, because it’s the same one that leapt to my mind – “yeah, like I’ll be able to afford the data charges to make use of mobile computing“.

So what if – and I’m guessing it’s a big ‘if’, because there’ll be a lot of big companies who’ll object to the idea – there was a free-to-use wireless broadband spectrum?

Changes things a little, doesn’t it? [image by OpenHandsetAlliance]

* We’re unashamedly rather biased about Jason’s ideas and writing, as we’ve published him twice here at Futurismic.