Apple Could Sell The Cloud To The Masses

January 20th, 2010

I’ve been reluctant to get on the whole “cloud computing” bandwagon. I still don’t really get the benefit of having all your productivity stuff up in some server somewhere vs. working locally, I worry about security, like having local files that I control and for all the time spent in a web browser, an equivalent amount is spent offline doing stuff to said files.

Yet it kind of struck me recently that I am a pretty big cloud user in one respect: Netflix Watch Instantly. All that video content is online, not locally stored, and accessed through streaming. Now we have rumors of iTunes in the cloud, inspired by Apple’s recent purchase of Lala, a music streaming service.

The non-technological masses need a specific reason; a use case, to adopt new technology. Imagine an uber nerd demoing virtual reality, wearing a portable computer with a monitor in a pair of eyeglasses. All the geeks will say “cool!” but most everyone else will ask “why?”

Apple presented music as a reason to carry around an iPod. Great move, people love music, and were already used to the WalkMan concept. Then Apple merged the iPod with a cellphone. Now everyone’s carrying around an iPhone — a portable computer. Music, cellphone, and an Internet communicator are the reasons.

Apple has basically gotten millions of people to carry around a nerdy, portable computer with a unique touch interface, through the hooks of music and a cellphone. Genius.

So music and entertainment — movies, TV shows, and books — might be similarly used to get average people to use the cloud. Apple already has information on what’s stored on our computers through the Genius feature and what we’ve purchased through the iTunes Store. If they enable this iTunes subscription service and give us cloud access to everything already purchased — boom, we’d be instant cloud users, without the barrier of uploading our own files.

And there’s definitely something easier to accept about storing entertainment media up in the cloud. It doesn’t have the same “woah, wait a minute” feeling of putting your financial information or personal, private documents online.

The Apple Tablet might be the missing piece. I’ve assumed it would sync to a computer in the iPod / iPhone paradigm. But perhaps it will also hook directly into the Apple entertainment cloud, pulling all this cool stuff onto the device.

If so, it will pull millions of entertainment junkies into the cloud computing future — without even realizing it. Again — genius.