Cloud Architectures and Cultural Memory - Challenges of Information Management Beyond the Cloud - page 3

between sites to build a correlated, multi-site, view of who you are, what you are
doing, and what your interests are.
There are also offerings that straddle consumer and business markets, or focus on
businesses; notable pioneers here are Google (with Docs, Calendar and other
services), Microsoft, to some extent Yahoo, and a few other players.
When we look at applications in the cloud, the technical definitions go out the
window. Really we face a set of technologies and business models coming together to
advance a world view that most of what you are doing in your interactions with
information of various kinds (and with other people) has come off of your desktop, it
has come off of machines you control and actually the locus of control over your
destiny has moved out of your hands. Someone else holds and controls the tools and
sometimes the content as well, and sometimes the content is not very useful without
the tools to display and manipulate it.
You may have seen, earlier this year, the offering of Office 365 from Microsoft,
which basically moves away from a desktop centric application suite to a very
attractively priced network provision of these application services. Google, in a very
real sense, was already there with a range of services like Google Docs. But while the
Google applications suite was created as a cloud-based set of services, Microsoft is
following a deliberate product development strategy in that they are moving away
from, or at least starting to move away from, a very profitable franchise that is built
on local software into something that is cloud-based.
Most recently and really the most aggressively framed development in this area
that I have seen at scale is what Adobe has done, where basically they have said they
are not going to sell you software anymore (well, more correctly, license you a local
copy of software); those days are over, your only option is to rent it through the cloud.
Now contrast that to Microsoft's position, which I interpret as: we will be happy to
take your money if you want to license (“buy”) it locally, or we will give you a
financially attractive deal at least for the moment if you want to rent it through the
cloud because we are trying to drive business that way - but we will accommodate
users and take their money either way. Adobe took a very, very aggressive stance and
basically said we are moving to this new environment. Period. A little later in this talk
we will return to these developments: I will argue that software as a service has some
really scary implications when we consider interactions with the creation, the
character, the management and the access to the broad cultural record.
Enough about clouds in general.
I am going to cover two sets of issues tonight: one is around the character of the
cultural record itself and how some of these developments in cloud computing are
changing the nature of the cultural record - with particular emphasis, frankly, on the
sort of personal or individual realm as opposed to the large-scale commercial realm.
The other thing I am going to talk about is how the ways in which we manage and
provide access to the cultural record, both the record we have already accumulated
over centuries and centuries of human activities, and the record going forward, how
the way we manage and offer access to that record changes because of the cloud. I
think we will see some very interesting things quickly in the access arena, and I will
start there.