In the post-PC era; the battle for the desktop has moved on to the battle for your data; Microsoft’s leaked new features for SkyDrive demonstrates this nicely; joining Dropbox, iCloud, the soon to be announced Google Drive and a myriad of others, where you store your data is becoming more and more of a battle-ground. The Battle of the Desktop has moved from the Battle of the Browser to the Battle for Your Data; throw Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter and sites as Flickr into the mix; this is heading to one hell of mess and one hell of a fight.
Where on earth are you going to store your content? And once it is there, how do you get it out and more importantly will this drive stickiness? Apple seem to think so, Apple are making tighter integrations with their operating systems and the iCloud; Mountain Lion and iOS6 will see more features leveraging iCloud natively; Microsoft will do so similar things with Windows 8 and SkyDrive; yes, you will be able to access your data from other operating systems and devices but it will not be the experience you will get from the native operating systems.
Native Operating Systems? Will we see even tighter integration with the operating systems? Will we see Cloud-Storage gateways built into the operating system? For example as broadband gets faster, is there need for large local storage devices? Could your desktop become a caching device with just local SSD storage and intelligently moving your data in and out of the Cloud? Mobile devices are pretty much there but they deal with much smaller storage volumes, is the desktop the next frontier for this?
But could the battle for your data produce the next big monopoly opportunity for Microsoft and Apple? Building hooks in at the operating system level would seem to make technical sense but I can hear the cries from a multitude; service providers, content providers and the likes will have a massive amount to say about this.
For example, there are the media devices such as PVRs etc; with content providers and broadcasters increasingly providing non-linear access to their content, why is this not all on demand and why do we need a PVR any more? A smaller device with a local SSD cache would make considerably more sense; they’d be greener and removing the spinning disk would probably reduce failures but this would mean a pretty much whole-scale move to IPTV, something which is a little way off.
But arguably, this is something that Apple are really moving towards; owning your content, your data and your life will be theirs. And where Apple go, expect Microsoft to be not far behind; you think the Desktop is irrelevant? I for one don’t believe it; this story has a long way to run. It’s still about the Desktop, just that the Desktop has changed.