According to an Associated Press story, Jobs and Apple may be moving iTunes toward a model where people would no longer have to download individual songs; rather, they’d simply access the songs they want from a central server via their iPod, or computer or other device, delivered via the cloud. What does this mean for us?
Last year a company named Lala came up with a plan for the iPhone that would enable customers to pay a small fee to host all their songs online. The program would stream songs instantly to the phone after a user spent 10 cents per song to house them on a cloud-based server. The dime would be credited back to buyers who subsequently bought an updated, permanent download. Apple, as it turns out, didn’t allow Lala to market its application through the iTunes App Store, and then ended up buying Lala. Coincidence, I don’t think so…
Apple has to be moving toward cloud computing; the AP story says that the company is building one of the world’s largest data centers about three hours from Raleigh, in Maiden, N.C., more than three times as large as its current data center in California. Meanwhile; Apple will never release anything till their worldwide events or the day it happens. It’s pretty obvious that Apple is moving toward the cloud to distribute songs and other content through iTunes, as well as beef up its Mobile Me cloud-based data storage service. Buying Lala was just the first step, the new Apple cloud server data center is step two.
I think that everyone out there is very excited about cloud hosting, cloud servers, cloud everything. It will help businesses to save money, help the user to save money, and help everyone to spend less on hosting costs. I think it will also help the way that we configure our IT. We now will squeeze every penny out of that server that we have. Apple cloud hosting will work. Amazon cloud hosting will work. Rackspace cloud hosting will work. Soon, everyone will have a different cloud hosting platform. Hopefully someone will standardize what it will be!
