December 17, 2012

"What we are seeing are the early stages of what I call, 'The Appification of Everything.'"

Says Anthony Wing Kosner:
This is not about adding more icons to your home screen, though, but about a fundamental shift in how we metabolize information and entertainment. The web as the universal storage medium is being superseded by the internet as universal flow medium. Instead of thinking about the web as a hierarchical tree of documents — a Wikipedia of Wikipedias — we need to start thinking about all of that content as an underlying service layer for application-based interfaces.

29 comments:

Shouting Thomas said...

Awful jargon ridden nonsense.

Why can't the guy write in plain English?

When somebody does this, I assume that they don't have anything to say.

Shouting Thomas said...

How about this as a simple way to say the obvious?

Cloud computing seems like it's going to win.

Applications and data will reside on the cloud instead of on the device.

Tablets and mobile devices are the wave of the future.

See how easy that is to do?

Maybe that's not what the guy is trying to say, but his jargon cannot be deciphered. Who knows what he intended to say? So, I've stated the obvious as simply as possible.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

Putting "ification" on the back of anything is always funny, same as hiking your pants up to your armpits and waddling about the room.

For example, consider the erectification of my penis.

See?

Wince said...

I took it to mean that instead of consulting content of the web directly like books on a shelf, apps are going to be like research assistants that take that content and delivering value-added information to the user.

Not sure I want my information that filtered.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

It sounds close to appeasement.

The article is all about the good sunny side... the dark side is somthing akin to the mark of the beast.

Bryan C said...

I think (think) he's saying that we'll see a shift from using the Internet to track down information to using apps that actually correlate big pools of data to answer our questions, or to do things for us. A lot like Siri, or Siri's underlying analysis engine, Wolfram Alpha.

He's avoiding the term "artificial intelligence", but that's essentially what he's getting at.

Farmer, I'm hearing audio too. I thought it was a video lower on the page, at first.

Palladian said...

Every time there's a natural disaster, the idea of "cloud" computing winning should send a shiver down your spine.

I like having my apps and my data local.

Shouting Thomas said...

I like having my apps and my data local.

For developers, the application cost becomes an obstacle. Adobe Creative Suite is now available on a subscription basis at $30 a month for people who already own a license. That means that the developer always owns the latest version, and constantly receives upgrades from the cloud.

If I decide to work again, I'll subscribe to Creative Suite on the cloud.

The data probably should be stored both locally and on the cloud.

We all forget that the hard drive will die on our PC or Mac at the age of 3 to 5 years. Backing up doesn't matter until your hard drive fails. Which is always does... eventually.

Patrick said...

I didn't understand one fucking word of that, including "and" and "the."

Quaestor said...

Shouting Thomas wrote:
Cloud computing seems like it's going to win.

Nah. We've been here before, and that also was pushed just as hard by the same cast of ne're-do-wells. The Cloud is just the second coming of Thin Client.

Things will come crashing back to earth (i.e. back to local storage on a server that you own and control) when the first major corporate user gets hacked and compromised.

Bob Ellison said...

ST, I have now maybe fifteen hard drives ranging from a few months to about eight years old. This has been a rolling situation for me for about fifteen years now; I retire old drives when they're in laptops that are no longer current enough or when they're too small to be useful.

I haven't experienced a complete failure (of the HD hardware proper) since the 1980s.

Craig said...

Bae Du Na plays a clone, Sonmi451, in Cloud Atlas. She's a metaphor for something, but I'm not sure what. I'd like to buy one.

Shouting Thomas said...

If Ritmo were to become a tech writer, I imagine that his prose style would be about the same as this "Appification" dude!

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Things will come crashing back to earth (i.e. back to local storage on a server that you own and control) when the first major corporate user gets hacked and compromised.

You dont understand... We're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more hacking like that regardless of the politics.

Bob Ellison said...

Lem, we need to have a national conversation about such hacking. In fact, I propose that someone very important go on a "listening tour", talking to hackers, hackees, hacked devices, and Luddites.

Larry J said...

Nah. We've been here before, and that also was pushed just as hard by the same cast of ne're-do-wells. The Cloud is just the second coming of Thin Client.

Things will come crashing back to earth (i.e. back to local storage on a server that you own and control) when the first major corporate user gets hacked and compromised.


It gets more complicated than that, although security is a serious issue with the cloud. Last year, I helped my company analyze the requirements for a major document management system. The company had over 110,000 employees spread over more than 30 countries. They wanted to bring everything under control which is a non-trivial task. One of the issues dealt with HR records and where they're stored. Europe has stronger laws dealing with the privacy of personnel records. One of the restrictions was on where such data can be stored. For example, for a German employee, the HR records had to be stored in Germany. Some cloud providers (such as Google) couldn't make that assurance. Others, such as Amazon, could.

Governments and companies have sensitive data in such areas as personnel, payroll, taxes, medical info and proprietary technology. Until cloud providers can assure total security from hacking and disruption (ain't gonna happen), we have to be very careful playing in the cloud. In aviation, there's a special type of cloud that has killed a lot of people. It's called "cumulo-granite". Not all clouds are your friend. Some are full of rocks.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

We need to take these apps off the street.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Is it too late to use ...

You just don't get it do you?

Paddy O said...

Can I confess something, don't think poorly of me...

I've never used an app. Not once.

I don't care. I don't want to spend the money--either monthly or in single dose--that would get me access.

I've never been convinced that I need one for any other reason than making an already convenience laden life even more convenient.

I know... feel free to pity me.

Quaestor said...

I got the audio ad as well. I had several browser windows open when it started to shout at me about the how some people are so unfamiliar with butter they confuse it with margarine. I was really chagrined to discover the culprit was the Althouse blog. I sent a nasty e-mail to Unilever in reply.

Besides bombarding us with extremely loud trash audio, Unilever is run by a crowd of hectoring nannies who want to dictate their "sustainable living" BS to the masses. The problem is it's hard as hell to avoid feathering the Unilever nest unless you're a Granny who makes soap out by the cement pond.

Quaestor said...

Larry J wrote:
[We] have to be very careful playing in the cloud...

On target. The Cloud is for the trivial only... your amusingly useless iPhone app, your easily replaceable pod playlist, your repetitive and pointless snaps of the wife frolicking on the beach at Cancun...

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I know... feel free to pity me.

You mean when your friends come over you dont hand them the tv remote walk away and change the channel via your smart phone?

You are missing the joke of a lifetime.

Quaestor said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Quaestor said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
edutcher said...

What he means is your hard drive is going to be in cyberspace.

Quaestor said...

Paddy O wrote:
I know... feel free to pity me.

Be proud that your brain still functions well enough to do WITHOUT (damnit) those silly necessities of modern urban life.

Paddy O said...

"You are missing the joke of a lifetime."

For now. In ten years, I'll be hilarious when I bring it back. Like the guy with the laser pointer in the movie theater.

Fred Drinkwater said...

LarryJ: A number of companies, both large and startup, are working on layered, or partially local, cloud-based systems for data and apps, precisely to address the problems you noted with pure cloud-based systems.
One startup I am familiar with is targeting law firms, financial institutions, and medical institutions, all of which have strict requirements for access and security, imposed by law and by internal policy.
I'm under NDA, so can't say much about the system I'm most familiar with. But, if you look at the problem of physical remoteness of the hardware supporting the cloud, the crude fundamentals of a solution are pretty clear.

Jerome said...

Good thing there isn't any malware in the cloud. Or am I supposed to say "malapps"?