iClouds on the Horizon?

"Enduring Genius"
Jobs left plans for more Apple products
Thomas Grillo, Boston Herald (October 10, 2011)

"The Apple genius stockpiled fours years worth of blueprints for fresh products to ensure his company's success, according to reports.

"Despite his illness, Jobs, the co-founder and CEO of Apple who died last week at the age of 56, had been masterminding updated versions of the iPod, iPad, iPhone and MacBooks, and overseeing the development of the delayed iCloud project, which will allow Apple users to store music, photos and other documents remotely, according to a report in the Daily Mail.

"Carl Howe, director of Yankee Group's Consumer Research group, said he's not surprised that Jobs was at work on future Apple products, noting that the design registration for the iPad was completed in 2004 but not introduced to the marketplace until last year.

" 'It's not like these guys plan only a quarter or two in advance,' he said. 'Jobs anticipated new products years ahead.'..."

We'll probably be hearing about Steve Jobs for quite a while. As the Lemming opined last week, Mr. Jobs had quite a bit to do with developing the interconnected world we have today.

That said, the "future Apple products" sound a whole lot like current Apple products:

• Probably with new features
• Possibly with better performance
• Maybe with some number of bugs fixed
  • And a lower number introduced

Even the "delayed iCloud project" isn't all that new: at least, "cloud computing" has been around for years. This blog's first post about cloud computing was in January, 2009, as the Lemming recalls.

Back then, cloud computing would cause the death of the PC. The Lemming sounded off on "death of" articles last month. (September 28, 2011)

The Lemming thinks "cloud computing" makes sense for some functions. In a way, this blog is an example of cloud computing. The Lemming uses a desktop computer in central Minnesota to connect via the Internet with servers run by blogger.com: and it's those servers that store the posts.

Until some millennial day, when Internet connections never fail and data stored online is absolutely, positively, failsafe secure - the Lemming thinks that quite a few business and personal data storage and management will be done on-site.

How hard is it to make "failsafe" systems? Let's look at a definition for the term:

"failsafe- A process that uses controls and logic to stop an improper operation or transaction before it occurs and creates an error condition or defect. ex.- an entry program for distributing a single charge to several departments by percent that will not update if the individual entries don't add up to 100%."
(Bridgefield Group)

The example Brigefield Group gives shouldn't be too hard to get right: says the blogger who doesn't have to write the code; and get it approved by a gaggle of managers. More complex operations, like an online database? The Lemming suspects that making something like that "failsafe" when it comes to security will be somewhere between extremely difficult and flat-out impossible.

But the Lemming's been wrong before.

Vaguely-related posts:

• "Steve Jobs, 1955-2011: Computers and Hyperbole"
  (October 7, 2011)
• "Cloud Computing, Dropbox, and the Postcard Principle"
  (May 13, 2011)
• "Cloud Computing: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?"
  (April 22, 2011)
• ""Flail the Rude Fresco?!" - It's Not the Technology"
  (February 14, 2011)
• " 'Manage - - - Like It's the 1800's!' "
  (December 5, 2010)