As it tends to do around this time of year, Google is making waves this week with its Google I/O developers’ conference in San Francisco, where it announced not only the innovative WebGL-enabled music video we profiled Wednesday, but — more importantly for the future of computing — its Chromebook series of netbooks, which sit somewhere between the tablet and the laptop and are designed from the ground up for cloud computing.
Perhaps Larry Ellison wasn’t wrong about “thin clients” — just 15 years too early about the tipping point when processing power and data storage would retreat from the personal computer at the edge of the network, migrating back to big, centralized mainframes like the one pictured above.
Google envisions schools and businesses snapping up Chromebooks (initially from Acer and Samsung) at bulk rates for deployment across student populaces or roving sales forces. But as happened with the personal computer, plenty of “regular” people will surely buy these devices over the coming years too, as their data and software continue to migrate to the cloud where they can be accessed by multiple personal devices.
After all, if all your music and apps are stored online, why would you carry around a laptop, with its expensive memory, operating system, and other accouterments more suited for downloading email in 1996 than for listening to Spotify as one edits a Google Doc and plays the web app version of Angry Birds?
As music fans make the transition from iTunes-style music collecting to the cloud — not only on these recently-announced Chromebooks, but also on smartphones, tablets, and other computer-like devices that are not computers — they’re in for some big changes:
The main allure of cloud music is its elimination of bloated client-side software like iTunes, which duplicates music files all over your hard drive, eats up RAM, and requires wires to transfer music to devices. Instead, your computing devices will function more as input points for uploading songs, bookmarking them on music services such as YouTube, tagging them as favorites within a music service, adding them to your personal collection, or making playlists out of them in order to find them more easily within a large subscription library.
Your media and playback software will reside on a server far, far away, whether it’s administered by Google, Amazon, Apple, or whoever. Say goodbye to knowing where your music actually lives — the future of music collecting lies in access, not storage.
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