This week Amazon came out with their Cloud Drive. At first glance it looks like old news. Amazon cloud is offering free 5GB of space online that you can save your pictures, music and files to. Big deal. Dropbox does the same thing. It offers less space at 2GB, but has the very important feature of synchronizing any file you put into a Dropbox folder with their server which then distributes it to any Dropbox linked to your account on other computers you downloaded Dropbox to.
But here's what's got me excited. Its not that the Cloud Drive can play music. It's that Amazon is the first major player to offer cloud space to people in a scale that could matter. I know people have talked about cloud computing as the next big thing for years but I feel like its finally happening and its not because the Amazon used the word "Cloud" in their product :P I know the concept and technology is nothing new, but really all the sweet gooey goodness is in the execution. I'm sure people said "yeah duh" about the idea of programming small application for mobile phones. But it wasn't until the App Store came out that people changed the way we thought about applications or "apps" on our phone.
Imagine:
XYZ University has a licensing deal with Amazon to provide 50GB of cloud disk space for every student enrolled at that school. XYZ freshman students goes the first class of the semester armed only with their iPad, and upon reading the list of books required for the course on the syllabus, proceeds to download the textbooks onto their cloud drive from where else? Amazon. The next week, their first homework is due. The students upload their documents (if they haven't done it on something like Google Docs already) and transfer it to their TA's cloud disk with space set aside for homeworks that come in. Now when these students graduate and go to work they take their clouds with them. There they combine their clouds with their coworkers while they collaborate resulting in cloud babies for the future generations. But I digress...
Some schools and corporations have some version of systems like this. But its not about whether we have the capability or not. Its that now it seems we are close to some real implementation and that market infrastructures are really starting to take form. It doesn't take a genius to see this and I'm sure Amazon and other companies are trying to get something like this into implementation. But who knows?
Eh. Maybe it won't happen. Maybe I my head is in the clouds. But what I am certain of is that I'm tired of carrying around a USB stick everywhere.
