"The point is not to be married to your presuppositions," writes critic Bob Lefsetz in his latest email newsletter. The context of the article is a familiar argument: Lefsetz is criticising the music industry's reluctance to change the way that it needs to in order to adapt with ever-changing technology and the needs and wants of consumers.
To the best of my knowledge, the first time I heard reference to "the cloud" was at a press conference for a Sansa MP3 player launch, powered by streaming music service Rhapsody. A co-worker had invited me to tag along with her and write a brief article on the device for PSFK, a blog focusing on innovative ideas that improve lives. The MP3 player itself turned out to be unique, and I wanted one immediately: it was a device that let you grab streaming music from Rhapsody's service and take it with you on the go - for $14.99 a month, you could have as many albums as you wanted at your fingertips, and it offered new playlists based on your likes and genre-based "channels" that updated each time you synced the player to your computer.
The question everyone asked about the Sansa was simple: did it stand a chance against the iPod? In reality, the actual problem was larger in scale - the question, really, was "how do you get the average person to understand the value in both this product and the Rhapsody service?"
People like to own things. When it comes to digital music, it doesn't matter if you're buying MP3s through the iTunes store or downloading them illegally. They're still on your computer at the end of the process. They exist on your hard drive; you own them. With Rhapsody, you never owned any of this music. It was unlimited, and you could listen to it as much as you wanted as long as you paid the $14.99 a month, but if you quit your subscription, you had nothing to show for it. You owned nothing.
The really crazy thing about it all was this: Rhapsody's biggest hurdle was also its greatest achievement. With the launch of the Rhapsody-supported Sansa device, the company brought itself one step closer to its ultimate goal: a library of music not tied to any one computer or mp3 player or stereo system, but one that would live on its own and feed into all of those devices whenever you wanted to hear it and however you wanted to hear it. Because you didn't "own" it, your usage became uninhibited and unlimited. The music would live in a "cloud."
This concept has evolved a great deal over the years, and I will definitely be talking more about it. Right now, though, I'm floored by how relevant it has become with respect to my iPad. Because I'm "slow" when it comes to understanding how things work, I didn't really realise what it would mean to be using as a "computer" a device that essentially has no "desktop" or hard drive to speak of. In practice, this means there's nowhere to save your documents to. You can download applications (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) that simulate the experience of desktop word processing, but these documents will be inside your iPad (un-email-able, essentially trapped) until you connect it to your computer and pull them out - presumably to live on that computer's desktop.
That seems kind of crappy.
Yesterday, while trying to write my first blog entry, I found myself faced with this reality as I looked for a place to simply save my file and put it in Blogger. (Writing in Blogger itself proved a challenge; the rich text editor doesn't work at all, and it took me a good half hour to figure out all I needed to do was switch to the "Compose HTML" screen and pretend I was writing code.) Google Docs was supposed to be my solution to this - it's the easiest way for "normal people" like me to understand what living in "the cloud" might mean from a document perspective. But Google Docs doesn't work on the iPad, and no app seems to have been invented to properly fix it.
Eventually, after about an hour of reading tech blogs attempting to come up with quick fixes and downloads that serve as functional "workarounds" for the problem of keeping documents in an editable manner that you can access from your iPad, your computer, or email to anywhere, I have to admit I gave up for the moment and wrote my entry in Gmail and sent it to myself.
Still, the process made me really excited. After all, what was the worst thing about every laptop I've ever lost? The files that I lost in the process. (Sometimes I learned my lesson and I backed things up, but I've seen CDs break and external hard drives crash and does anything really work?) What if, by not having a place to save anything to, the iPad is giving me a chance to rethink the way I access my files? All this time, I've been married to a presupposition of how these things are supposed to work. Having ownership of a concrete storage space for this stuff has gotten me nowhere; I want all of my files to live in the cloud!
It's kind of exciting when you think about it - the same way digital music in the cloud sounds exciting when you explain it to ordinary, everyday people like us. Finding the right way to actually put this idea into practice, though, is overwhelming. How do I do this?!
I'm testing out applications and websites that try to move closer bit by bit, but for now...I'm writing these in Gmail and emailing them to myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment