A place for my stuff, cont.
: Fred Wilson continues the dialogue on a place for my stuff: Is it a server in your house or up on the Internet? (My latest posts here and here; Ed Sim’s here and here.)
With all due respect to these guys who know a helluva lot more about making successful business than I do, I still want to keep pushing this issue up the ladder to see it from a more strategic viewpoint.
Let’s make two (somewhat risky) strategic assumptions:
1. Always-on-everywhere broadband will become ubiquitous soon. See this note on Wi-Fi news with Sprint, AT&T and Cingular fighting over getting high-speed wireless access up soonest. This means that you will be able to get to your stuff from any device anywhere anytime — even on a plane. Once that happens, it’s less important what you store on your device. It’s also less important what clients you have; any client can get data from anywhere.
2. The entertainment and technology industries will figure out digital rights management so that you will be able to store your stuff where it’s convenient — whether that’s on your iPod or on your TiVo or on your TiVo in the cable cloud. OK, this is an optimistic stretch, but if these industries don’t figure it out, they’ll be committing murder-suicide. (See lots of DRM coverage from Ernie Miller.)
Once these assumptions come true — if they do — you should not worry what device you’re using with what clients and what you’re storing where. You will want to get to your stuff from anywhere anytime on anything.
That’s why storing your stuff in the cloud is preferable.
Short of that, you may want to store your stuff in this device or that — but that really means you’ll want to be able to sync your stuff (which is an opening for a company like FusionOne, which happens to be one of Fred’s portfolio companies).
In any case, I won’t want to worry about having to get a song or show from this TV to that PVR to that laptop to that video iPod; I will want to either (a) download or stream — it shouldn’t matter if bandwidth is sufficient — to anything from anywhere anytime or (b) download and sync seamlessly. This still argues for storage in the could, not on a single device I have to install and manage in my home.
