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The logo for MobileMe, Apple's upgrade to its .Mac suite of Web applications,
comprises the icons of four of the service's major features--e-mail, calendar,
address book, and photo gallery--floating in a cottony white cumulus. The image
announces an elegant, user-friendly take on cloud computing, syncing users' data
wirelessly between Macs and PCs, the Web, iPhones, and iPod
touches.
MobileMe has garnered positive reviews for its features and its
intuitive user interface. But accessing Apple's cloud has been a stormy
experience for some users. The service's debut on July 10 was marred by delays
and missing features. Apple apologized for the launch troubles, but since then
some users have altogether lost access to their e-mail.
The company also
backed off from using the term "push"--which implies near-instantaneous
synchronization between devices--in describing the service. While MobileMe does
push changes made on the Web or an iPhone or iPod touch, changes made from a Mac
or PC can take up to 15 minutes to propagate.
Apple was contacted for
this article but was unavailable for comment.
Cloud computing has been
touted as a potential tool for everything from improving business infrastructure
to helping consumers keep tabs on their contacts. Storing data in the "cloud" of
the Internet rather than locally allows users to access that information
anywhere and at any time.
Some cloud-computing applications--like
Google's Gmail, Google Calendar, and the Google Docs document-sharing and
-editing service--live entirely in the cloud: users' data is stored remotely and
accessed via a Web browser. Other applications--like the contact-syncing service
Plaxo--use the cloud to back up data and keep it up to date across multiple
computers and mobile devices.
MobileMe combines both approaches, syncing
data between computers while providing access to a user's e-mail, contacts,
calendar, and photos via the Web. But the service's troubles illustrate an
obstacle to the mass acceptance of cloud computing: the average user has a low
tolerance for downtime.
"Availability is essential in cloud computing,"
says Thomas Vander Wal, founder of the IT consultancy InfoCloud Solutions. "If
constant access to information and objects is a requirement, then cloud
computing may not be a viable option without alternate solutions." The problem
is not limited to Apple. Vander Wal notes that a July 20 outage on Amazon's
Simple Storage Service (S3) affected a host of Web-based applications that use
it to store data online.
One product affected by the outage was Dropbox,
a file-synchronization and -backup service for Macs and PCs. "Syncing and Web
access to files was offline during the S3 outage," says Dropbox founder Drew
Houston. "But Dropbox stores all files locally, so users could still access and
change their files, and queued changes synced immediately after S3
returned."
Dropbox's ability to respond to the outage highlights a
difference between services that exist only in the cloud and those that use the
cloud to keep devices current. "Sync-based solutions are somewhat more tolerant
of minor outages, whereas online-only applications are completely sensitive to
downtime," says John McCrea, vice president of marketing for Plaxo.
This
point is not lost on Google, which is developing a product--Google Gears--that
brings the resiliency of synchronization to its suite of Web-based applications.
"Where Google is moving with Gears, which provides the ability to work locally
and sync and update the cloud when there is connection, is a viable way
forward," says InfoCloud's Vander Wal.
Regardless of how much redundancy
developers can build into their applications, the question remains: are users
ready to trust their data to the cloud? Vander Wal is skeptical. "A lot of the
conceptual models just aren't there in people's heads," he says.
The
trick, says Dropbox's Houston, is to make the transition as familiar and
seamless as possible. "The cloud will make a lot of things easier, but it's less
useful if you have to change your behavior or can't use the apps you need," he
says. What people need, Houston says, is a solution that "just works."
Source: www.webhostdir.com
