by Arra Derderian
1. May 2010 20:55
After acquiring online music service Lala Apple has decided to shut it down and most likely begin work on a new way to deliver iTunes music to customers via cloud computing. This would allow customers of iTunes to store all of their music online and have it available to them anywhere they go. No longer will a user need to worry about buying a 4GB or 8GB iPod, storage will be taken care of inside Apple's new cloud. This coincides nicely with nicely with 4G coming along soon so streaming performance will be better and also it is speculated you will be able to download some songs to local storage so you can listen to songs if you are offline.
I am not sure how I feel about this change but being part of a company that believes in the future of the Cloud model I like the idea. I worry about the fact I have purchased something that I really do not have in my possession. It is stored remotely on an Apple server that I can access but at anytime can be unavailable to me or taken away if I happen to violate an Apple agreement. Technically speaking I wonder if Apple will store a separate copy of every song for every user who purchases it and place it in a location only available to that user or will they just grant access to that song for each user who purchases it. The second model seems like it would save tons of storage space but it does change what you are actually purchasing. No longer are you purchasing a physical commodity like an MP3 but it is really the ability to access that song in the cloud.
With the cloud model there are some questions users have to ask themselves concerning the ease of accessing files versus the security of having the file stored locally. Even more as people stop buying computers and start paying for operating systems as a service. It will be interesting to see how quickly the cloud model is adopted due to its resource benefits amidst the security and privacy concerns of users.
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