Interesting post over at Smoking Apples, where Milind Alvares shares his thoughts about the iPad as a breakthrough device that will change the computing world as we know it forever.
From the post:
“I propose the next major shift in computing platforms has begun. It began with the iPhone, and it’s more evident with the iPad. Computers of the future won’t have a file system as we know it. There won’t be a Finder window, there won’t be a home folder, there definitely won’t be an applications folder. So far progress in the computing world has been all about adding new features. From now on its going to be about removing things to make room for a better experience.”
This is an interesting theory. Pretty much what Google is building with Chrome OS: making the file system structure invisible to the user, pushing everything to the web. But there are many drawbacks in doing this, and Milind just got it right:
“Take word processing for instance. iWork documents will reside on the web, but only immediately required documents will be cached locally—why would you want documents from 2 years ago available for editing? These documents will be available on the iPad for editing, iPhone for viewing and projecting, and any other device that fits into Apple’s product lineup. That’s where Google has it wrong. To roughly quote Jobs in 2005, “the marriage of cloud services, with rich local client apps, is a great thing”. Google wants to do everything in the cloud, including writing the software that drives it—as is seen in their Chrome OS. Apple wants to create rich local functionality that drives itself with data from the cloud.”
This is the main point. You can’t force the user to edit documents online, because you don’t know if the user will have a 24/7/365 active internet connection. Everyone should, sure, but the reality it’s a little but different from this utopia. Just as I wrote in my post about Chrome OS some time ago, a total-cloud OS is going to fail. Turns out that the solution lies in both “clouding” things and caching them locally. You want to open a recent document? Just fire up Pages on your iPad and choose it. You remember you had this 6 months old spreadsheet that could come in handy again? Head over iWork.com and download it again. That’s how cloud computing should work in my opinion, that’s what Apple will do.
What really bothers me is thinking that the file system structure will die at any level. Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of those people that believe the iPad is introducing a new era of personal computing. But thinking that for this reason desktop computers will change forever into biggest iPads is just as dumb as thinking that mobile phones will replace my dial-up home phone. Sure I don’t use my home phone that much, but when everytime I need it - it’s there. I believe that in the next years I’ll use the iPad maybe even more than my Macbook, but it won’t replace. The Finder window won’t disappear, it will be different. But it will be there.
