Consumer Cloud Computing

SalesForce.com, Rackspace and IBM are making their service offerings only in enterprise and can be called pure enterprise players; companies such as Apple have services only in consumer cloud; Amazon, Google, Microsoft have offerings in both the segments.

What is Consumer Cloud?

So, although IBM, Salesforce.com and Rackspace are normally where the cloud discussion begins, we can eliminate them for the purposes of this article.

Consumer cloud incorporates services that would have required on-premise storage, computing, and device hardware. All of these can now be delivered from remote elastic storage and devices such as smartphones, notebooks and PCs. It represents an integrated service offering that delivers a significantly enriched user experience.

Key Vendor Offerings

Apple recently announced its iCloud offerings to deliver highly contextual synchronous information through its various devices to various form factors. The user gets a unified view into his/her calendars, contacts, mails, messages, music, pictures, videos and books; he can work with them anytime anywhere without needing to manually transfer/sync up data across devices. Apple does all this by providing storage on the cloud (5GB free).

Some of the interesting things you can do are,

• Buy and read a Kindle book
  
• Bookmark a page in the book to return for reading at a later point from another device
  
• Watch movies on the move, pause and play from another device
  
• Take a picture and share it with friends and family in near real time
  
• Have a video conference call
  
• Go here for more possibilities.
  

Apple has integrated offerings as iCloud to tap in users; however, it suffers from a lack of openness, as iCloud services are available only on Apple devices.

Google has strength in its platform Google Apps and provides applications such as Gmail (email), Calendar, Google Docs (collaboration using documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints), Picasa web albums (pictures), Google Talk (voice), YouTube (videos), Google Maps, Orkut (social networking), Chrome (browser) and many more free apps.

Go here for a complete listing

In devices strategy,

Google has a partnership with hardware vendors for the device and owns the OS platform Android.

Google Chromebook is similar to the iPad or other tablets and has several interesting features:

• Runs with its very thin operating system and applications that are updated automatically when connected
  
• No need to explicitly install OS or antivirus upgrades, as it promises to do all this without compromising security needs
  
• Boots in as fast as eight seconds and provides Chrome browser (other browsers won’t work) for surfing internet
  
• Works with documents (files, photos, etc.) that can be published to the cloud
  
• Plays music from cloud or can download locally
  
• Leverages storage from cloud (5 GB of free) and has very small local storage (16GB)
  

Offerings like Google Apps for Education (go here for more info) are offered as an integrated offering for specific user segments for college and university students. Google has a strong platform, good applications, open standards/compliance, a good device base and an integrated/unified rich solution offering to serve a specific user segments (such as education).

Microsoft has strongly evolving platform offerings in the forms of Windows Azure, and BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite – Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications, and Office Live Meeting online).

Microsoft XBOX Kinect offers online gaming and recently opened up its beta of SDK for game programming. Go here for more info.

Microsoft has a fairly good application base such as Windows Mail, Windows Live, Windows Live Mesh (to synchronize files across devices, 5 GB free storage on SkyDrive), Windows Live Messenger, Bing (search), Microsoft MapPoint (location intelligence), Microsoft Media Player (music), Microsoft Money (consolidated integrated view into bank accounts, loan accounts, credit cards) and the browser as Internet Explorer (IE), to name a few.

In devices strategy,

Microsoft provides OS for Windows Phone 7 and has partners for providing hardware.

The next update of Windows Phone 7 (Windows Phone 7.1 called “Mango”) promises to bring several features such as:

• Conversation threads so a conversation with the same person is seamlessly integrated across various channels such as MSN Messenger Chat, SMS and Facebook
  
• Integration with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
  
• Multi-tasking with some of the apps and games, and with the ability to run them in the background
  
• Hands-free messaging with speech to text and text to speech
  
• Search results displayed as search cards with summary information while searching products, movies, etc.
  
• By automatically reading your current location, “local scout” provides information about the important activities around you such as movies, restaurants and can’t-miss events
  Bing vision - Phone camera aims at a book to get all the information about it such as places to buy, download and read from Amazon Kindle.
  
• Games hub - XBox live - ability to play online games
  
• Easier to connect and share - read conversations, ability to integrate office and personal emails
  
• Augmented reality
  
• IE 9 is built into Mango (web browser is fast, for smarter and easier speed reading)
  

By the end of 2012, Microsoft is coming up with a Windows 8 Tablet (no formal announcement though) in competition to iPad, or Google Chromebook. For more info go here.

So Microsoft has strong evolving platform, good applications, an emerging device base footprint and fairly open standards/compliance for interoperability with non-Microsoft applications or devices. Integrated story on Windows Azure Cloud is needed by weaving Games (Windows XBox live, Kinect), with multiple apps (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Kindle, Windows Live, etc.), to deliver integrated unified services for specific consumer segments to multiple devices such as smartphones (Windows Phone Mango), tablet and PC.

Amazon has a strong platform offering as Amazon web services, the leader in the platform space.

In the applications space,

Amazon Cloud Drive provides 5 GB of free storage for uploading and managing files (documents, music, videos, etc.). Amazon Cloud player allows you to play music from the web to a desktop or Android. Amazon’s App stores provides users with options to buy applications online for playing music, games, etc.; as a promotion drive, it is currently offering one free app every day.

Amazon’s App store for Android works in the same manner as Amazon web site for other devices, where user can view recommendations about apps and buy them using credit cards.

In devices strategy, Amazon has the Kindle for reading books (buy once and read anywhere). Among its many benefits are:

• Thinner and lighter -- 8.5 ounce, one-third-inch thin
  
• 800,000-plus books available
  
• Wi-Fi connectivity (hot spots) in more than 100 countries
  
• Capacity of up to 3,500 books on the device
  
• Ability to highlight content, mark online notes; the Kindle is also perfectly readable in a bright day light without any glare
  
• Ability to share clipped messages on Facebook and Twitter
  
• Battery life of more than a month
  
• Easy navigation, search based on keywords
  
• Clip and add notes, bookmark pages, review documents (pdf)
  
• Integrated dictionary and Wikipedia
  
• Text-to-speech reading and ability to resume reading from where text-to-speech is finished
  
• Music available while reading by transferring MP3 from PC to Kindle device using USB
  
• Once purchased, books are backed up in Kindle and can be downloaded on any Kindle device
  

Amazon is also coming up with an Android tablet that supposedly will give strong competition to the iPad.

Thus Amazon has strong platform, good App store, open standards/compliance, and an evolving device strategy. It is a matter of time when all of it gets weaved together to provide an integrated service offering such as Apple iCloud.

Integrated Vendor Landscape View

All the companies we have discussed and depicted in Table 3 and Table 4 have more or less similar building blocks (platform, applications, and devices) to deliver an integrated service offering like Apple’s iCloud (soon if not today) .

Factors influencing Consumer Choices

Service offering variations

Considering the variations in experience, interoperability, and integrated services of each of the vendor stack, consumer preferences would drive choices initially.

Loyalty

It is difficult to make an Apple customer switch to a Google or Microsoft offering, and vice versa. Consumer loyalty is an important factor and will drive choices.

What Happens to First Mover Advantage?

But too often we come across the discussion of the “first/early” mover advantage. First movers definitely have an advantage, but we shouldn’t write off the one catching up as we often do. Just to put things in perspective, Sun brought Java for Internet programming around 1996. Microsoft brought .NET around 2001. Although Microsoft was almost five years late to the game, today Java and .NET have significantly bridged the gap of market share, and it is now nearly 50/50.

Check application platform adoption trends here.

A similar trend is prevalent in the smartphone marketplace, with Google Android and Apple iPhone stealing the market share from RIM (check here at http://prn.to/qK6bjL).

Can Vendors with a presence in both the enterprise and consumer segments drive choices?

As the potential user/consumer may want to seamlessly manage office (enterprise) and personal (consumer) information from the same device rather than having to maintain an independent one for office and personal needs, companies with offerings in both spaces may get preference. Hybrid players such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft may get an edge here as they have offerings in both segments.

What’s coming in Consumer Cloud?

The next set of consumer services could affect home devices such as a household’s Geyser what is geyser? Water maybe?, air conditioning, refrigerator, washing machine, microwave, lights, TV, phone, security systems, car, and possibly more.

A few examples, which sound futuristic now but may not be in the near future:

• You can switch on your home lights and air conditioning from your car as you approach your home. The device interactions are through the cloud as hub and the devices as spokes, and not peer-to-peer.
  
• As you get up in the morning, you watch the news, the water heater gets going, it signals your water is ready, and then the TV switches off as soon as you leave the room.
  
• Home security systems can be turned on from remote locations.
  

Similarly in enterprise, you may have various applications and devices interacting to deliver similar self-service, intelligent experiences.

What is needed to make this happen?

As more and more devices need to talk to each other through the cloud to deliver intelligent integrated experience to user, the technology must expand to address:

• Need for building applications/devices to communicate
  
• Standards for devices to communicate
  
• Partnerships across diverse set of vendors and service providers
  

Summary

As shown in Tables 3 and 4, Google and Microsoft are not far behind Apple in producing iCloud-like offerings. Amazon is also catching up with its aggressive devices strategy. For Google, Microsoft and Amazon, it is still possible to bridge the gap by either building the missing pieces from the various layers of stack in Figure 1.0, through building partnerships (Microsoft Windows Phone 7 + Nokia), or by acquiring a company (Microsoft + Skype). However, the integration of platform, apps and devices will need to happen in a way that’s as smooth to consumers as the iCloud is.

References

Apple iCloud
Google Apps
Google Apps for education