The abbreviation 'PC' will soon no longer stand for 'Personal Computer', but 'Personal Cloud'. Come 2014, the latter will be where consumers keep their digital content, not the former. So says Gartner, a market watcher, reckons what you might call 'PC 2.0' will be ushered in by legions to tech-savvy punters already used to …

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Tuesday 13th March 2012 08:55 GMT Anonymous Coward

Like hell it will.

My data, the apps I use and the operating system stay here where they're not reliant on a shoddy internet connection, the whims of some remote unaccountable cloud company or the ability of the office tea boy to not un-initialise the logical volume on the SAN upon which they reside by accident.

That way I can pretty much guarantee 24x365 access.

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1. Tuesday 13th March 2012 10:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Like hell it will.
  
  I agree.
  
  But in addition may I tender my sincere thanks that you said "24x365" instead of that abominable logically-flawed term "24 x7 x365" which seems to be so common?
  
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  1. Tuesday 13th March 2012 15:11 GMT The Software Fairy
    
    Re: Like hell it will.
    
    That's either a six-fold redundancy or a seven year deployment cycle. The former could be quite handy when the other six your 24x365 availability servers go down.
    
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Tuesday 13th March 2012 08:59 GMT Mike Smith

The sub-editor missed a bit

"So says Gartner, a market watcher, reckons what you might call 'PC 2.0' will be ushered in by legions to gullible eejits who fancy themselves as tech-savvy punters because they can find the power switch nine times out of ten and who already used to operating online"

There, fixed it for 'em.

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Tuesday 13th March 2012 09:04 GMT Bill B

Cloudy connectivity

This is all very well but assumes connectivity. I've just returned from the States, and for me connectivity didn't exist. There was no WiFi in the state park I was in, data roaming is an eye watering £9 per MByte and when I looked around Walmart for data sims all I could find was sims that charged $15 per day for 1GB

The operators aren't in a rush to improve matters which makes it dangerous for a traveller to keep stuff in the Cloud. Since one of the selling points of cloudy access is that it allows you to get access to your data wherever you are, the lack of support from operators is a big minus, but of course Gartner, in their rather narrow minded blinkered crystal ball gaze probably haven't taken this into account.

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1. Tuesday 13th March 2012 20:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Cloudy connectivity
  
  I know it's been said, but Gartner, idiotic as they may be, are hardly foolish for focusing on the 99.999% of consumers who don't regularly travel to remote locales. In this context it's fairly clear that 'wherever you are' means 'NYC or Seattle or Las Vegas or Paris', not 'NYC or Lahore or Abuja or Kabul or that bit of Interstate 88 in upstate NY between exit 11 and exit 40'.
  
  And, honestly, you can probably get on the net fairly easily in Lahore or Abuja. Kabul and I88 are a bit touchier, though.
  
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Tuesday 13th March 2012 09:20 GMT g e

At least

We technical types will become elite again, as everyone puts their crap into the cloud and gets nothing done with it because all they have is a stupid bloody tablet to access it with and it can only do email, calendar, misunderstand your speech and angry birds and the other 50% of it only works in the USA.

No-one will know what applications actually are any more ;o)

Putting my rates up in 2013!

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Tuesday 13th March 2012 10:00 GMT MJI

Rubbish

Nope - data will still be on my local hard drives.

So I am supposed to keep 100GB of pictures and nearly a terabyte of video material on a computer I have no control over?

Yes nearly a terabyte, and I have not finished.

Using DV compression, 1 hour is 14GB approx, so 2 hour 10 minute tapes from 1980s are about 30GB.

And I am not compressing more than that, until I need to.

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Tuesday 13th March 2012 10:12 GMT Christian Berger

Just wait until the cloud bubble bursts

I mean we already had a bit of such a bubble in 2000 when suddenly many free webmail providers burst. The same will happen with other companies.

Such things always come in waves. We are currently in a wave towards centralization of IT, but the next one will be in the other direction.

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Tuesday 13th March 2012 11:28 GMT SJRulez

Well in the case of MS:-

If Date = 29/02/2016 Then PC = Problem Cloud

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Tuesday 13th March 2012 11:30 GMT Barry Tabrah

Stop stealing our abbreviations!

I am sick and tired of abbreviations being hijacked for the latest fad. We fought hard to establish our abbreviations. Many computer companies died for them ... Tandy, Tiny, others beginning with T.

It was bad enough when politicians stole it for Political Correctness, now our own industry is stealing it again.

Well no more! This is where we stand and fight for our abbreviations! We shall establish a standard set, and all others shall abide. Are you hearing me Reg? Don't think I haven't noticed your headlines awash with the latest abbrevicreations! You're on notice as well.

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Wednesday 14th March 2012 04:16 GMT Anonymous Coward

Just one more thing...

...half the people here are saying that people, being idiots, will undoubtedly lap up the Cloud PC 2.0 whatever the hell, and the marketers will clean house.

...and the other half are saying that Gartner are idiots, couldn't predict their way out of a wet paper bag, and nobody will ever possibly fall for this bogus cloud shit because nobody needs it (supplying as proof their personal edge case, natch).

...and sometimes both of these in one post.

So, which is it?

Is Gartner correctly predicting the lumbering of a clueless herd of consumer cows?

Or is Gartner losing the plot, because even lumbering clueless consumer cows are smart enough to not send their shit to someplace called Akamai and like where is that anyway the Cayman Islands or something, like a tax haven thing?

I'm genuinely curious.

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1. Wednesday 14th March 2012 07:23 GMT Mike Smith
  
  Good spot
  
  You've nailed it. I'd go for the former; I think IT pros do lose sight of the fact that they're in a minority.
  
  The cloud does sound seductive to the technically clueless, and even more so to characters who think they're technically switched on because they can write a macro in Excel and animate a PowerPoint slide.
  
  On that basis, Gartner are correctly predicting the latest manifestation of human stupidity.
  
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2. Wednesday 14th March 2012 09:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Just one more thing...
  
  I think the answer is 'both' and we've been over-simplifying things. In my earlier post I was guilty of this when I referred to 'Gadget Junkies'.
  
  The reality (as demonstrated to me by my own children) is that there are clueless consumer cows and clued-in consumers. My children are gadget junkies and are fully adapted to the modern world. They love it all and happily use multiple gadgets to access material and to socialise. But they are also well aware that they cannot trust external systems for long-term storage. They keep their stuff on their local PCs and back it up on external hard drives.
  
  So Gartner will probably be right, but only up to a point. And we will be right, but only up to a point.
  
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