Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Apps vs. Cloud - Two Tech Buzz Words Oppose Each Other

You can't watch television without seeing an ad for either an app, the cloud (a la Windows 7), or both. As the tech industry lends itself to fads and quickly-passing trends, the latest of these are apps and the cloud. They're buzz words. Important concepts? Perhaps. But the truth is that an app is just a software program, which we've had for decades, and the cloud is just a highly advanced model of terminal computing -- also in existence for decades.

What I find interesting, however, is not the trendiness of these terms (that's to be expected in the tech sector) but how the two hottest buzz-words in tech today are actually diametrically opposed. Let's look closer.

Apps. As more and more people are carrying high-powered computing devices in their pockets that we foolishly still call "phones", the software world has capitalized on the sudden spike in the shear number of devices capable of computing. And, if it's capable of computing, surely there is something it should compute. Whether it's a personal finance app, a business management app, or just sling-shotting birds at pigs, consumers and businesses alike have bought into the idea that they must use the computing power that's in their pockets.

Cloud. Ironically, cloud computing is quite the opposite. Exactly the opposite, in fact. Cloud computing is more than just storing data in a shared location. It's using the supercomputing power of mega-servers to run applications instead of the computing power of an individual device -- be it a desktop computer or a handheld "phone." Business solutions like hosted word processing, hosted phone systems, and hosted CRM software all offer one simple advantage to the customer: no need for computing on your end.

So who will win? Will we continue to distribute computing needs to client-applications, or will broadband connections serve the computers of the future much like IDE cables have in the past? It's a race: which can grow faster, the computing power of the small device or the bandwidth available to cloud terminals?

Labels: apps. ter, Bandwidth, Broadband, omals. cloud computing