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At my office we often discuss this exact topic and most of us want exactly the same cloud. It seems like a purely "nerd" solution though. Dropbox has the market

by lbotos 14y ago

At my office we often discuss this exact topic and most of us want exactly the same cloud. It seems like a purely "nerd" solution though. Dropbox has the market cornered because not technical users get it and it works. On multiple occasions we've come to the conclusion that this is a nerd dream and out of the computational desires of the average user. The question becomes will the gap between "average" and "power" user only get larger or smaller with simple cloud services at the forefront? Also, we've come a long way with API's but I don't know of too many services that allow competitor interop.

kwindla 14y ago
The reason I don't think this is just a "nerd dream" anymore is that general trends in the broader world are sharpening the need for really good cloud storage for everyone. Like a lot of folks here, I'm sure, I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. I built a peer-to-peer backup proof of concept in 1999, for example. (But knew, even while writing that code, that there bandwidth wasn't cheap enough for enough people for such a thing to take off.) The thing is, until very recently, my needs diverged a lot from all of the non-techies I know. But that's less and less true. These days, most white collar workers depend completely on their computers (and phones and tablets) to do all of their work, every day. Corporate IT investment in "collaboration" tools like Sharepoint and Dropbox is large, and getting larger every quarter. Having access to your files, and the files that your colleagues share with you, and the various static resources your company maintains on your intranet, is becoming more and more important. So there's a clear business driver to build more sophisticated storage, access and sharing capabilities. And, relatedly, many non-techies now use multiple computing devices every day. The laptop-plus-phone-plus-tablet user profile is the norm for more and more people. My sense is that iTunes Match and iCloud and various photo stream implementations are the special-purpose, walled-garden, leading edge indicators that this stuff will, eventually, get built into all our platforms and that we'll expect some level of interoperability between platforms. (Just as AirPlay is the leading-edge indicator that in a few years we'll all expect to be able to push video around between all our screens without having to use any wires.)

by lbotos 14y ago

kwindla 14y ago

The reason I don't think this is just a "nerd dream" anymore is that general trends in the broader world are sharpening the need for really good cloud storage for everyone. Like a lot of folks here, I'm sure, I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. I built a peer-to-peer backup proof of concept in 1999, for example. (But knew, even while writing that code, that there bandwidth wasn't cheap enough for enough people for such a thing to take off.) The thing is, until very recently, my needs diverged a lot from all of the non-techies I know. But that's less and less true. These days, most white collar workers depend completely on their computers (and phones and tablets) to do all of their work, every day. Corporate IT investment in "collaboration" tools like Sharepoint and Dropbox is large, and getting larger every quarter. Having access to your files, and the files that your colleagues share with you, and the various static resources your company maintains on your intranet, is becoming more and more important. So there's a clear business driver to build more sophisticated storage, access and sharing capabilities. And, relatedly, many non-techies now use multiple computing devices every day. The laptop-plus-phone-plus-tablet user profile is the norm for more and more people. My sense is that iTunes Match and iCloud and various photo stream implementations are the special-purpose, walled-garden, leading edge indicators that this stuff will, eventually, get built into all our platforms and that we'll expect some level of interoperability between platforms. (Just as AirPlay is the leading-edge indicator that in a few years we'll all expect to be able to push video around between all our screens without having to use any wires.)