Having online backup or storage provided with your new device purchase is not a new concept – notebook manufacturers have been doing this for years, as have PC and even server vendors.
Now that cloud is mainstream we saw in 2011 companies like Asus re-branding their complimentary online disk service as a cloud service. Apple rushed in with iCloud and helped make the term and concept more mainstream for consumers – which ultimately permeates through to business.
I personally still like the name “SkyDrive” – the name sounds cloud-like but also is functional in that the name implies that it is disk space in the cloud.
(FYI SkyDrive received it’s cloud-like name back in mid-2007 before cloud branding started to be attached to everything from cabling through to web hosting.)
So my not so bold prediction for 2012 is that most consumer devices will eventually come with some form of “personal cloud” functionality.
Is this good or bad?
Read my latest piece at BoxFreeIT and then come back here to comment.
Discover more from Loryan Strant, Microsoft 365 MVP
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Provided there are multiple copies of the data in this offsite “cloud”, I’m satisfied, but I would question the capabilities if the vendors aren’t just white labelling existing proven services.
My favourite for this is Live Mesh due to the peer to peer nature of the changes. The integration with SkyDrive is weak/confusing, but as a standalone tool I think it’s fantastic. I’ve looked around for anything that is comparable, and really couldn’t find anything that matched it’s simplicity or price.
Agreed, are these manufacturers really going to the effort of building their own cloud services when it’s not their core business? Certainly it builds stickiness and brand loyalty to an extent.
How much cloud storage does each user have when they combine multiple providers and vendors? Off the top of my head for personal use I have free accounts with Dropbox (2GB), Box.net (50GB), SkyDrive (25GB) and probably a few others I can’t remember.