Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Amazon Cloud Player!

Amazon has introduced Cloud Player stating the complexities in personal media management. You have to download, synchronize, backup and all that with your traditional devices, PCs and the media provider. Amazon says, You don't have to do all that. Amazon itself provides a million songs to download - sorry - to listen. And you can personally add to your account and listen to those songs wherever you are and whichever device that you use. All the media files are managed from Amazon cloud. Doesn't it sound so simple?.

The emerging architecture trend is that you just need to have a net-enabled device that connects to cloud. That's it!. You would have universal access to products/services!. Amazon says that its not just media, you can pretty much manage any digital content like documents, photos, etc.

The biggest problem that I see is that, why would I need to manage my personal music on a Cloud and consume it from a Cloud. I need to unnecessarily payout the data charges to my Internet Service Provider [Unless amazon is providing Internet for free! :-) ]. Yes, I do manage my emails on cloud, because email is an inherently network-intensive application.And there were good amount of reasons for managing emails on the cloud during good old days where people didn't have access to PCs or SmartPhones.

We are dealing with a powerful dichotomy here...The Smartphone are getting better and better and more powerful competing with PCs. Cloud is becoming more mainstream and competes with mainframes in capacity. So, the kind of applications that we would want, should have an architecture that would leverage the best of both worlds. Not just one dimension!. I see amazon Cloud Player just leverages the Cloud and not the devices!. In the era of Smartphones, people would like to have immersive experiences that would take full advantage of the device's capacity, not a dumb client.

If we design our applications to be cloud intensive or rather chatty, customers are going to pay for it big time to Telcos!. I think the conversations with the cloud needs to be moderated by the application architecture!.

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