On Web, Internet and Cloud
by totocaster. Average Reading Time: about 2 minutes.
Web is not an internet. Cloud is. “Cloud” is simply new name for the internet, that’s all it is. For me, “cloud” sounds simpler and fluffier, so I’ll stick with it. Web, on the other hand, is a little part of the cloud. Little, but most commonly used. So common in fact, that Google is trying to make you believe that web is a internet and cloud is something mystical somewhere above there.
Following article expresses very personal thoughts. That is what I think and what is right in my opinion.
Web
Web is some kind of 3rd party platform on top of your operating system. It’s like Adobe Flash and Java, with predefined purpose to serve you information in some multimedia and textual way. Web applications are something new and wrong, they are just normal applications connected to cloud but with a wrong user interface. Web had a clear UI guidelines, and those guidelines were made to serve documents on you computer from the cloud. That’s all.
Today, companies like Google are trying to shift everything to cloud… I’m sorry, to the web. That’s also wrong. I see the goal where they are going with this: to make computer act as a simple terminal to the cloud (yes, cloud), but on web? That’s like huge experiment without knowing what will happen. I don’t like it.
Cloud
“Cloud” is a big buzz word today. But in essence it’s good old internet, including storage, remote computing, services, web, everything that’s not on your computer is in cloud.
OS Native Apps
What’s wrong with them? I never had need to have Photoshop in my browser, neither I wanter my word processor to be in web-browser, neither my iTunes. BUT! I always wanter my Photoshop and Word as well as music to be in sync on every device I use or own.
OS Native App + Cloud
What wrong with Twitter on Mac or PC? It’s been ages since I last opened Twitter in my web-browser, as well as my mail. It seems native OS apps work great with cloud without even touching web. Are they slower? No. Uglier? Oh no. Less user friendly? No. So why should I have my iTunes user interface in my web-browser? No reason. But I’d like it to sync music with all my devices, via cloud.
iCloud
That brings us to iCloud. Which in my opinion is most correct approach of bringing cloud to our lifestyles as a consumers. Apple, with huge help of iPhone developer community, realized that using OS native apps with cloud services are much more efficient and usable that everything just ported to a web-browser. I really hope that iCloud will work properly (and not like Mobile.me which was rubbish) because it’s the only correct approach I’ve seen in many years of implementing syncing and remote storage services.
- I love native OS applications.
- I do not like web-apps, they have wrong UX and UI.
- Web is for documents, not apps, live it alone.
I do understand that a lot of you will not agree me on this, please leave comment bellow. I’d like to discuss.
“So common in fact, that Google is trying to make you believe that web is a internet and cloud is something mystical somewhere above there.”
I don’t get it, what Google is trying to do is to promote cloud as a next generation storage + processing architecture and web (again) as a next generation user facing application platform.
“So why should I have my iTunes user interface in my web-browser? No reason.”
Why do you care at all where you application runs: natively on your device or in the browser using HTML + JS?
What you should care about is that app you using should work for you, and I know you’ll say that web apps doesn’t work for you. But you forget that paradigm of web applications is still very young compared to old methodologies and probably needs years to become enough developed to have same capabilities as native apps.
I’m not saying that web apps are better then native ones (time will show which one will become mainstream), what I saying is that it’s yet another way to reach users ignoring what OS they are using, which gives developers possibilities to reach much more users. Maybe that’s not true yet, but again it just needs time for adoption.
And one last comment about synchronizing devices, when user data is in cloud synchronizing all of the devices and storing that same data on all of them is just wrong IMHO. User can save some of it’s data on local storage on one particular device in case of offline usage is needed, but in online scenarios fetching data directly from cloud and caching some parts in a smart way for quick access is the solution.
P.S. I think title of your post isn’t correct, you are talking more about iCloud then cloud itself.
P.P.S. Just because I’ve (and you too) mentioned Google, this comment is my opinion and has nothing to do with my employer.
Exactly because of that my friend. TODAY web-apps are crummy, slow and inconsistent in any imaginable way, weather it’s user experience or visual design. Native apps on the other hand are very, very good, especially on Mac OS X.
Maybe, in few years web (HTML platform) will become much better performerthat OS natives, I don’t doubt that, but today web is way behind.
I’m with you here, but today multimedia is so heavy that even most modern datalinks won’t handle that much. Plus, Apple win here as well with iTunes Matching system which prevents uploading “Lady GaGa” songs million times to the cloud.
In general, I’m with you, but those statement would be fair in 5 or so years from today.