The Future of Personal Computing

Getting Personal
A professor from Rennsalaer Polytech (cannot recall who) once said,
The personal computer is getting too personal.

Meaning - personal computing devices (Macs included), despite all their networking features have so far been incapable of accommodating natural human mode communication and cooperation.

In the future, personal computers will be obsolete. Not because the practice and processes of computing would become obsolete but computing will be a minority requirement in the realms of machine-aided-human-activities. The near future devices will be capable of computing nonetheless but whose role involves millions of perfunctory activities and only one of which is computing.

The future is in the cloud.

A device can virtually create as many virtual CPUs as the number of tasks running on it require. Dynamically and spontaneously increasing or reducing the number of virtual machines running. Vice-versa, a virtual super-device can be created over the network, whose resources the participating devices could tap into. Devices could subscribe to clouds as we currently subscribe to Youtube, Wordpress or Tweeter - pulling in and out at will with no detriment to the subscription system.

Instead of a hard-wired super-environment, we subscribe to clouds. We will have evaporation and condensation of virtual machines and processes. That is the power and efficiency of authenticated subscription.

Before anyone spouts any anti-666 big-brother-is-watching-you tower-of-babel ridiculousness, you have to realise that cooperative activities is a requirement of human existence. There is nothing big-brother about the clouds. It's like walking into a wet market, getting noticed, getting your chores done and then walk out. Nowhere anything near 666 here (i.e., if you believe in such a thing as 666) . Do whatever you want. You don't have to visit the large cities. You don't have to live in the large cities. You could keep your machines to your own small village, subscribe among your own fellow-believers, to your own little communes and qibuts. There will be millions of clouds rather than one single tower of babel.

There will be clouds whose existence is to sanitize communication to help other clouds maintain privacy and confidentiality. Virtual clouds make multiplying a few fish into feeding five thousand possible.

Cloudification
At this moment, Google seems to be the party that is paying the most attention to the cloud. Oh no, the cloud is more than Amazon's web services or Zoho or Microsoft's miserable attempts at cloudifying themselves. And just like missing the internet boat, Microsoft will again miss the cloud because they are carrying a huge baggage that induce them to be unwilling to provide an operating system that is small and compact and that does not run Windows. Before it's too late, Microsoft needs to shift their attention away from .NET towards .CLOUD.

Have you been cloudified, yet?