The computer industry generates buzzwords faster than an extroverted 20-year-old sends status updates, and “the cloud” is one of the more evocative ones. It is where your digital music, photos, e-books and personal documents live (or will live). No longer stored on a computer in a corner of the living room, Amazon and Apple and Microsoft now keep your stuff for you so that it can be fetched over the internet whenever you need it, right to whichever device you are using. It is the infrastructure that lets people flit from smartphone to tablet to e-reader to personal computer and have access to their data wherever they are.
To mix metaphors, there is a second string to the cloud’s bow. Amazon has always seen itself as a technology company rather than a bookseller, and was the first to grasp that it could make a commercial offering out of the infrastructure it uses to run its own global business. The last few years have seen a huge growth in major companies renting out...
Tom Slee has worked in the software industry for 20 years. He writes about the intersections of technology, politics and economics and is the author of No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice (Between the Lines, 2006).
Advertisement
Advertisement