I have been thinking a lot about cloud computing for a while now.  The advantages are clear.  You never have to worry about data loss, and you can access your information from any device, mobile, laptop or PC.

People worry about security, but this is more (to use a banking analogy)  of a cash under the mattress worry.  Lets leave that for the worriers.

On a more practical level.  I have a pretty fast laptop (ThinkPad, 2.7ghz, SSD) and I have constant access to decent bandwidth speeds.  Lets suspend reality and assume there is nothing faster.

What is in it for me in that scenario to use Bitcasa which promises the ultimate (to date) in cloud by providing my hard drive in the cloud.  My superfast laptop is by design, built to not need Bitcasa.  No matter how fast a Bitcasa is, it will never beat the speed of hardware between my CPU and my SSD drive.

hmmm

Yet the cloud seems intuitively the right thing for the moment.

I use Jungledisk/Amazon AWS for all my data backup/ sync, and Dropbox for all data shared with others (ironically Dropbox also uses Amazon), but anyway I have not the slightest fear of losing my laptop, nor having a drive crash.  Give me a new laptop and I will be up with my existing data in minutes.  I have done this enough times with different operating systems and devices to be quite confident there.  Yet …

Yet still there is an intuitive seductiveness about Bitcasa and the notion that my information is always there (even more) instantly.

Why is that?  At a minimum there must be a different design concept for hardware laptops and mobile that we have yet to see which levers the conjunction of bandwidth, cloud and processing capacity which we have yet to see.  Perhaps the Amazon Fire is a glimpse into this future where the cloud and the device interact in ways that could not exist in the old hardware <—> internet model.

hmmm