The Toughbook and the Rolex
If you're a frequent traveler, of course you wear a watch with special settings for changing your time zone without losing your Certified Chronometer certainty of the minute. You wear something like an airline-pilot-designed Rolex GMT-Master, right? Well, today that's quite possibly wrong – because your wireless phone will tell you the exact local time, without your even turning a knob, as soon as you turn it on when the airplane touches down.
Why carry an expensive artifact to do something that's done better, and cheaper, by the cloud?
I see the same challenge looming toward devices like the Panasonic Toughbook laptop, or the comparably rugged XFR laptop from Dell. These add bulk and weight to the bits and the CPU cycles that you actually want to use in the field, instead of putting the bits and cycles in a safe place – while you only carry an edge device (tablet or phone).
Carl Bagh at International Business Times puts this well, saying:
The smartphone industry continues to grow and is able to trump a laptop in terms of features and applications and the key element which makes this possible is cloud-computing.
The capacity of a smartphone has increased through cloud-computing. The cloud allows the creation of virtual smartphone images in the mobile cloud and to customize each image to perform specific tasks. Running applications remotely allows the smartphones to use the power installed in a data center and removes the limitations of the processing-power, memory, and battery-life limits of a physical smartphone.
We can carry the data capacity of a corporate CRM system, the processing power of a video render farm, the collaborative reach of an enterprise network, all in something that (i) fits in a pocket and (ii) can be lost or destroyed with minimal risk of compromising data and with tolerable cost of replacement.
Lawrence Walsh of The 2112 Group extrapolates:
I’m not sure if cloud computing was ever a real trend. The real disruption to the IT paradigm is mobility, which is part of the promise of cloud computing – access to data from any place, at anytime from anywhere. In that sense, the cloud is just a delivery mechanism to whatever endpoint is requesting applications and data, and a growing number of those endpoints are smartphones, netbooks, tablets and mobile computing devices.
Analyst firm Gartner says smartphones will be the primary Internet access point by 2015. Perhaps, but we may not have to wait that long.
In short words, Walsh adds, "The cloud, you ask? Well, that will become the virtual CAT-5 of the next generation of computing." The cloud will be essential, but also invisible: merely the taken-for-granted means of connecting us to our IT assets, which increasingly we won't bother to carry – or even to keep on our desks or in our data centers.
What will it mean when we can do things anywhere that once were only feasible when we were in an office, or where we could carry a laptop so rugged that it would survive anything that didn't kill the user?
It will mean that there's more demand for the functions of the most data-intensive, processing-intensive applications, and that the opportunities for people with data to sell or application skills to apply are going to keep on growing – even as the edge devices get smaller.
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