2012 Technology Predictions: The Cloud is Dead
The Cloud is Dead
Cloud Computing is dead. Ok, so not quite dead, but still hibernating for a few years longer. You’ll know it’s real when the Google laptop becomes a reality.
Cloud computing offers the promise of being able to do a majority of computation somewhere else and then stream the results to you over the Internet. It is almost like having your computer at home and just running a really long cable to a monitor at work. All the processing occurs somewhere else, and you just see the results.
The problem is not with the ability to do remote processing, but with the ability to transmit data quickly enough through the current infrastructure. It is too slow. Also, it means that if you have no Internet connection, you have no processing capability and whatever device you were hoping to use suddenly becomes worthless.
There are plenty of cases where cloud computing works wonderfully, such as cloud storage for documents and images, but it will still be several years before cloud computing it is really accessible to consumers.
