Do you have an Apple iPhone or computer?
Does it ask you for your “account password” too often and for no good reason? Is it, like many, stuck, and you dread the Fort Knox password-problem-process?
You are not alone.
Even the stalwart Android smartphone operating system (nicknamed “suck-an-apple”) leans on a cloud, but the brains behind those phones and tablets, many made by Samsung, already know and aren’t too stubborn to accept, people will never live in the cloud.
NOBODY LIKES CLOUDS
Google is behind Android, the operating system on most non-Apple phones. Google knows, because they invented the cloud years-ago, people are averse to use it. A recent rise in popularity of off-site storage and Internet apps is fueled by successful apps running on phones (mostly games) – but not by Apple thinking it’s nifty to revive the phrase “the cloud.”
Dropbox doesn’t use the phrase; neither does Android. At least not like Apple does; the cloud is the thing that’s stuck and bending your patience … the iPhone is built around the phrase.
The cloud … is a mess. And it always will be!
GIVE ME SOME SUNSHINE!
Have you used Apple’s calendar and allowed it to sync to the cloud and lost your important dates, for no reason, without warning, even just once? Once should be enough!
Is it possible, I wonder, to make Apple do iCloud without nagging constantly about passwords for your account, store, iTunes, everything? Apple will turn you away ceaselessly if you don’t have a credit card stored in their system, even if all you want is a free app.
My friend Bill walks around with an iPhone that’s crippled itself, and he looks at me thinking I know his password. I actually do, but wonder if I should tell him again. I think the problem is not mine, not even his. Those phones and tablets are going to, just like iTunes, credential themselves to death.
The wonderful cloud.
We didn’t ask for it!
A FEW SMALL CLOUDS ARE OKAY
Google did the cloud 15 years-ago. It’s no secret shortly after Gmail, Google’s online anchor, they offered everything but a spreadsheet for many years. It was free and done well, but no-one wanted to trust it. It didn’t feel right depending on it, especially with no sense of having a local, personal, “real” copy.
Then came Dropbox, which was so wildly successful it was almost as if they’d invented the cloud. Dropbox grew quickly for three reasons; it was simple enough to work, you kept a copy of everything, and they built-in a powerful “tell your friends, get free space” program. The timing of dropbox, when storage needs were increasing with video being so easy to create with smartphones, helped launch the company to standarddom.
Microsoft (they make computer software) is, at this stage, so long-later, officially caught with its pants down not coming up with a new idea since the Internet was invented. If you’re using their computers, you may, mistakenly, think they’re the best available; or you work for a company with cubes. The big copycat is alive in the cubes, with management who’d install Bell dialer phones if it were last decade’s industry standard. Technology proven in the past is the policy; the past, though, is getting harder to keep up with.
Technology is changing daily. People use smartphones for everything, phone apps are refined and some make big money, and the Internet is an established utility. Technologies that can’t do their thing, no matter what it is, as well as a smartphone, don’t have a chance.
But just because the Internet is well and proven doesn’t mean (Apple this is your last chance) people like the idea of the “cloud,” or trust it. They don’t.
PHONE X … CLOUD NINE …
Just because some companies, mostly Apple, DO like the “cloud,” doesn’t mean the rest of us do. It’s completely useless, my iPhone friends, unless it works. Don’t blame me. Don’t blame the Internet. Don’t blame Google. Blame the backwards and blind, two unlikely partners, Microsoft and Apple, for seeing nothing and thinking they can just keep pushing us like we’re blind.
Get an Android and solve your problems!
The turn is toward Google. Microsoft and Apple had the world on a string, but things change fast. Androids shipping today are sophisticated and leave nothing to be desired.
HOW FAR CAN AN APPLE FALL?
In the future you’ll see more dependance on trustworthy applications like Dropbox, which don’t try to do it all. You’ll see Apple’s iPhone continue on a long, slow drop from general favor. Apple will no doubt battle this downtrend by spending millions on television ads, until they can no longer afford to!
Apple’s new X phone is said to recognize your face, but I’m betting there’ll be implementation issues and the company doesn’t see the trust issue. Turning a camera “on all the time” will become symbolic of Apple’s ignorance of the evolution of the product they sell. The camera’s on in the office, too, by the way, courtesy of big old Microsoft, with its product “Hello,” which CNET says uses a computer’s built-in webcam. Nice!
You should be careful what type of hardware’s lying around if you intend to ever pick your nose again! Or, if you like apples, be careful when you’re in your fruit-of-the-looms!
NONE OF IT REALLY MATTERS
Just goes to show, what was once handsome may not be forever! The computer industry is less important, while the smartphone/tablet industry becomes our sole diet. The companies we rallied around in the 1990’s look as innovative as the 1880’s, but it may be a natural progression.
But it’s made Apple confused; instead of making its smartphones smarter, they’re reinventing the way the phone uses the Internet, and like a baby cable company with a budget, are just thinking up fun new things that are completely unnecessary. Opening your phone with your face … swiftly and smoothly … so you can begin to forget … your iCloud password.
Overconfidence is the opposite of what Steve Jobs did – he always brought out a surprise. The post-Jobs Apple has failed to see the long term curve, and without a hammer to the head won’t keep pace with Google and Samsung. The non-fruity rest of the industry is doing the unthinkable; making phones that work really well.
We love our phones, but don’t care so much anymore who makes ‘em.
CHANGE IN THE AIR
Meanwhile, the Internet will continue to drive new technology, while not being new technology itself. No big changes should be expected in the Internet’s simple purpose.
But Internet Service Providers will begin to bill like a utility, end-users paying at end-of-month for what they used, like for electricity. Such a change is inevitable. It makes sense for customers and will be a big play for the first ISP to do it.
Especially in the business world, serving cubes-cubed of constant use, there are plenty of users with money to make up for little users. Potential savings in customer service alone is impressive, as such a model eliminates sales-ey promises.
And while hardware-intensive, if a wireless ISP could deliver Internet to home users inexpensively and with self-install (like the “pizza dish” of DirecTV, now owned by AT+T), and do it well, it could put municipal-monopoly TV and phone providers like Cox and Comcast, for the first time and finally, out of business.
Long-range outdoor wireless technology, topographically-ubiquitous and purpose-built, not modified cable wiring, could penetrate any market and will be a critical sandbox far into the future.
INTERNET IS THE COMMON DENOMINATOR
Cellphone dialtone is already dead, despite being in wide use by the public. But the infrastructure, modified to deliver “data” over cellular towers all over the world, should continue to be useful into the future, but the pitch will have to be adjusted; all we need is the Internet; we don’t need phone.
We’ve known for years we can get dial tone over the Internet. Remember when everyone had a home phone? That’s not true any more, and that change took less than ten years.
The dependableness of the cell phone had to settle into a new routine, which has happened. The same dynamic, now, has set the stage for the cell phone to render its own billing line item obsolete. It’s just a matter of time.
Cell phone service is wildly overpriced, based mostly on convenience. The new generation of users will figure out how to do without, and those modified towers will finally serve only one purpose and no longer pretend to be, or need to be, the phone company. Prices will come down to compete with widely-installed Internet access, which will be, for many in urban areas, effectively everywhere. Everything will still operate the same, but what we now pay for, called cell phone “data,” will be the only thing we need to make a phone call or anything else. Cell providers will have to compete pricewise with straight up ISP’s.
If you give that smartphone in your hand a good re-look, you’ll easily see the line is thin and easily-broken requiring you to pay hundreds-per-month for “dial tone.”
MORE EVOLUTION
And if the cell phone, evolving into smartphone, can put a gun to the head of the gaming, technology, music and video industries, while devouring it’s own dial tone monthly-fee; which I predict will happen next … the phone eating the phone’s phone … just wait! The next thing, after that, and somewhat simultaneously, will be the phone devouring all its remaining parts and becoming nothing but … a small tablet … like it already is!
But probably made by Google and Samsung!
The phone is clearly becoming less and less a “phone!”
Technology is easily compared to organic evolution. There’s no camera that bests our eyes, no microphone that captures sound as well as our ears. The tablet will evolve in an organic way. It will, soon, be up to people to decide if they want devices built into their bodies.
THE UNEXCITING INTERNET!
Old is about to become the new new.
Older Apple devices will enjoy a resurgence in popularity; it may keep Apple in the loving hands of a frugal public for many more years, a boon based on the company no longer requiring the newest operating system actually be installed. This bodes poorly for new computer sales to the public for the biggest fruit in the game, and the company does not appear to be creating new monetization channels anywhere.
Hardware has evolved to a plateau, a turning point.
It’s already no longer hardware that’s making profits. Users of the future will pay for hardware reluctantly, because smartphones are well-built today, until something really new (that’s useful and really works, unlike 3-D or virtual reality) comes along. Current models will last for years under heavy use.
No-one’s spouting any longer about “Moore’s Law.”
Among the winners in the next ten-years will be Internet service providers, including the biggest like Verizon. Your tablet will be constantly alive with Internet connectivity that “comes” with your home and car.
While the feeling of “it’s free” will continue to drive applications, the modern-thinking ISP will slowly but surely continue to profit, not free, but as invisible as the electricity you pay for once-per-month and otherwise think nothing about. Only a little further down the road, electricity will be provided by the sun and stored in your home’s battery, already being made by Tesla. Your electric bill will vanish, replaced with a system maintenance contract, while your Internet bill trumps everything but groceries and mortgage.
Long-term importance is flushing out and a new generation is constantly eyeing the equation. The Internet is the only still-young technology in the mix, and will become one of the only things anyone, actually, anymore, pays for.