Nicholas Carr offers an excellent take on the role of “apps” and the changes taking place in computing.
The rise of the app store comes as the nature of personal computing applications is changing. Some of the apps sold for the iPhone and other devices are old-fashioned, self-contained programs, drawing on data stored in the device itself. But most of them are what might be called “cloud translators.” They serve as software gateways between the Internet and the device. They tap into stores of data that exist out in the Net’s cloud, from maps to message streams, and they tailor that data for some practical use geared to the device’s form and interface.
I tell people that using an iPhone is using cloud computing and they look at as if I were crazy. The fact that this goes almost totally without notice is the very reason cloud computing will continue to grow.
Comments on this entry are closed.