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The End of .Mac and Google Apps?
mattnyc99 writes "In his weekly tech column for Popular Mechanics, Glenn Derene predicts that everyone will have a home server to network their house within 10 years—rendering Apple's .Mac accounts and Google's productivity software useless. As prices for products like HP's MediaSmart Server drop and as processing power becomes more pervasive, Derene says, 'you'll ultimately need a centralized server—that high-powered traffic cop—to coordinate the non-stop exchange of information between your new multitude of devices.'"
It's called Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
Those who don't understand Plan 9 are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.
Indeed, TFA says something completely different than the Slashdot summary. It says that .Mac and Google datahosting are basically the same as a 'home server' solution. Furthermore, it is quickly obvious that the opposite of what TFA says is true: in 10 years, everyone will use a .Mac/Google datahosting solution, and not a home server, since
1. The functionality is essentially the same, given broadband, the only difference being problems when the connection is down. Paying for a physical home server and maintaining it more than offsets that cost.
2. Home users don't have the same misgivings that corporations have with hosting their data remotely, especially if the remote hosting solution is more convenient. And it will be. So essentially the only argument against remote hosting is eliminated for home users.
Google's got the right approach, Microsoft with Home Server will be proven wrong. My 2 cents.
I actually think it'll go the opposite way.
.Mac, and creating a backup that's not online wouldn't be too hard either. Encryption probably becomes more important, since if you lose this little storage device, someone else could probably break into it easily.
My hunch is that as the general public becomes more technically savvy, and storage devices get smaller, you'll actually wind up carrying your entire computational environment everywhere with you, operating system, applications, data, and all, on a little flash-drive-like thing about the size of a credit card.
You can actually do this today, if you're mildly geeky - a 2 gig flash drive and a lightweight Linux distro leaves you plenty of room to do most of your daily activities, and you can use it on any fairly recent Intel machine. (though we'll need to do something about those boot times...)
So anyway, I'd expect to see a standard terminal appear, which is probably an x86 piece of hardware, that boots off your little data cartridge, and you go on your merry way.
This has the advantage of the net-based computing paradigm - your personal setup and applications, everywhere you go. It doesn't have the massive problems of net-based computing, like completely losing access to your data when a fiber-seeking backhoe takes out your net connection.
Yeah, it would be pretty easy to lose your data, by losing the card, but there'll always be online backup services, like Apple's
"Oh, I like geeks way better than I like humans." - Mari Sarris
So I'm living 10 years in the future I guess. I have a home server with a registered domain - I get email directly, serve my personal web content such as photo albums, program in alarms that wake me up in the morning via a distributed music system, backup the laptops I use throughout my house, cache DNS and automatically scarf data I need for managing my finances - stock quotes etc off the web.
A couple of things are a bit kludgey because I don't have a truly static IP; but that is not too far in the future. Really the only downside with that is I have to send my email out through my ISP's SMTP rather than directly.
The advantages over Google etc. are essentially unlimited space (I have 2 TB online right now) and very very fast access to the content, and I have control over the features of my setup. The disadvantage is setting up a reliable backup strategy takes some time and effort.
A year ago I used a hosting service for many of these features, but snce Cablevision made it's Boost service available with unblocked ports and dynamic DNS I moved everything to my home server.
There's one major wildcard in your predictions--batteries (or mobile power solutions, in the case of things like methanol-based fuel cells). I think you're on the mark with respect to the home environment--laptops and off-site storage--since we're almost there now in major cities where bandwidth is plentiful (e.g., FiOS) and with people storing everything on gmail and photo sites.
The mobile landscape outside of the home, though, will be heavily dependent on how batteries develop. Without some breakthrough in power density and miniturization, we'll still be stuck with mobile devices like laptops and iPhones that are limited to 3 or 4 hours of use, which is just not enough to provide the reliability needed to really achieve the integration to which you refer because of people's cell phone needs. Plus, physically it's impossible to achieve the quality of a typical Canon digital camera with your mobile device because you need a retractable lens. So, I think for the moment, barring any clever innovations for improving cell phone cameras or lengthening battery life, the mobile device landscape in 2017 probably won't look too different than what we have now.
And, people won't want to pay twice for the computer they use in the home and on the go, so we'll still be using a laptop of some sort in 2017.
Obviously this idiot doesn't have broadband access from a US telecom (DSL) or cable company. Every single one of them explicitly forbid any sort of "server", and enforce it by blocking nearly every port from 1-1024.
My ISP, OptimumOnline, is a great example; for years I've been getting around their blocks by using high ports and/or ssh tunneling, but just last month they essentially NATted the whole network -- I can't ssh to my home box, no matter what port; Hell, I can't even ping the thing.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
"And you really think Joe User is going to administer his own email server instead of using Gmail?"
Not if it's designed by geeks. Now if you'll excuse me, my VCR is flashing 12:00.
"It just takes unnecessary time and effort, especially for someone who just doesn't care about technology."
Technology that's intentionally designed to be user-hostile, but give a geek lifetime employment.
BTW, kind off topic. But is the renaming of "personalized homepage" to "iGoogle" part of that unholy alliance between Google and apple? Because if that's the case, then we might very well not be using Google apps and .mac in ten years, we might just be using iGoogle with a mac-y interface.
I have to go now, I just threw up a little in my mouth.
The Farewell Tour II
A server in every home? People want less to deal with, not more. Why have a home server if you can just connect to one online?
One word: privacy. Oh, another word: performance. Most home networks are 100 Mbits/sec while the internet connection is typically less than 1 Mbit/sec, two orders of magnitude less. This relative difference will remain for the forseeable future as home networks move to GigE while broadband speeds slowly increase into the tens of megabits. Think high resolution photos and video files.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I don't see how the march of progress is going to undo these business models. The big boys have increasing resources too, and they remain beyond those of the home user. I mean, my age in years is steadily increasing, but I'm not about to overtake my older siblings any time soon.
I use servers heavily in my home... for dumb storage, ftp, serving webs, VNC access to apps I don't want to lug around, an Exchange server, a couple streaming media apps, and a smattering of other misc crap. I have over 3TB of storage scattered among them, some of it mirrored. Still, I use Google mail and apps more and more as time goes by. I'm sick of moving account settings and configuration files and extensions and mailboxes and preferences from machine to machine. I don't mind backing up the critical stuff in case of catastrophic failure, but keeping up with all the incidental crap through every normal upgrade cycle is getting way too tedious.
Until hardware, operating systems & software don't need maintenance & replacement, my habits will probably keep moving in the direction they are.
Pi Ran Out