ZumoDrive is not going to change anything. There was an app exectly like this back in 2001 or so. Back then, it did not work because the connections were too slow and space was not cheap enough - at the moment, it will not work for those same reasons.
There is no doubt that there are a lot of people who will use this - but it's not yet ready for mainstream. It's much easier to store you stuff on an external hard drive than on Zumo, and till it becomes easier, this will not really hit.
The startup will be profitable very quickly, they will gain hundreds of thousands of users, but ZumoDrive does not represent any big change in computing... for now.
Right now, data is cleaning bandwidth's clock. My internet connection is just barely faster than five years ago, but now I want to ship around pictures, music, and movies wholesale, whereas back then I really didn't care. I'd estimate two orders of magnitude of increase in my data desires... and I was a power user five years ago (as well as today, though epic torrenters have me beat). My wife has gone from email and web browsing to shipping around video, too, for her it could be even more.
Is it feasible to expect data growth to level off long term? Tough to say. Audio probably won't grow much, but pictures and movies can get a lot bigger, but eventually you have enough resolution. But in the fuzzy long term, there are other possibilities for large-scale data movement that are harder to predict.
That's because processing power is no contest. Local processing power is growing radically faster than anything else, and this will continue. Local processing power is growing so radically faster that it has long since penetrated the architecture itself, and we now have deep, deep memory cache architectures desperately trying to catch up to the increase in local processing power... even reaching out five inches as opposed to five nanometers has a huge performance impact.
If you want to take advantage of that, you're going to move data closer to the processor. Processors are quite likely to live in the home, for a variety of legal and technical reasons. (The updated version of rms' Right to Read story is the Right to Compute Locally... long term, you are a fool of epic proportions to give up all computational power to the owners of the cloud!) Due to some fundamental latency issues, and the fact the cloud will always be partially underprovisioned due to simple economic reality, there may still be a desire to move large amounts of data around in the future. Bandwidth is hard, and easily consumed.
(And while I'm here, since I've built the foundation: I don't think the cloud is the total future for these reasons. The cloud will never be able to be as reliable as local resources, because the cloud will always be distant, latent (as in latency), and busy. Local resources backing to the cloud is a far, far better proposition than a pure-cloud-with-dumb-terminals-everywhere play.)
I'm not so sure about the cloud. That huge amount of data comes with a lot of complexity as well and much of the data is only really valuable if you can share it (video) or combine it with data from others (data mining). If data needs to be close to the CPU, it could mean that both live locally or both live in the cloud.
Local resources are idle most of the time. I wonder if that's economically sustainable in the long run. On the other hand you're always going to need idle resources to cope with peak demand. It's never going to balance out completely, even in the cloud.
I don't think data growth is going to level off. There are so many untapped sources; sensor data, 3D models, biometric data, etc. But I'm not sure people will process all that data locally. I'm not even sure where locally is. People move around, so the latency issue does not just arise when they're at home, next to their game console super computer thingy.
I worked on location based systems in the past. Latency was a big problem then (and probably still is), but having a PC at home with 16GB of RAM and a TB hard disk doesn't help.
The scarcest resource in mobile devices is not memory or bandwidth or the CPU, it's the battery. So for the time being, serious number crunching is not going to happen locally on mobile devices.
There are so many factors and I know so little of potential technological breakthroughs or even plain physics. Technology doesn't advance linearly. Batteries could suddenly sustain 24 hours of biometric number crunching. There could be Gigabit WiSuperMax in the air in 5 years time. I don't know.
But I feel people don't want super computers at home. I even block flash simply because it keeps my laptop fan busy. I tried that world community grid software a while back, but I just couldn't stand all the noise and heat.
I doubt that people will keep buying high powered general purpose computers. My guess is that we'll have our game consoles, and our mobiles and various sensors and the data is going to be streamed straight into to google's or Microsoft's data centers. It makes me feel a little uneasy though.
Benefits are value received. The value that I get from a home computer do not depend on how little time it spends in its idle loop (or even turned on). The value also doesn't necessarily depend on how often I use it. (A home defibrillator is extremely valuable even if it's only used once, and fairly valuable even if it's never used.)
There are opportunity costs. If I buy a hard drive that I never use I could have bought shares of amazon instead. By your definition, money could never be wasted or used inefficiently. If I waste money and my competitor does not, then it's not economically sustainable for me.
Opportunity costs have nothing to do with utilization. Moreover, they're covered in my initial comment "Economic sustainability is a function of cost and benefits, not utilization."
Low utilization may imply "waste" but cost and benefit is what matters. Benefits that I get for the costs I incur determine whether buying a new PC is a good idea, not how idle it is.
In fact, trying to drive to maximum utilization frequently results in higher costs and lower benefits.
If you deny any link between benefits and utilization, then I understand your argument. But I think your argument is wrong because it contradicts the very purpose of buying capital goods.
You buy capital goods because utilizing them makes you a profit. Just owning them does not. But I agree that this is just a general rule which is not true in all situations, particularly not in economic downturns.
If I buy 3 TB of hard disk space expecting to serve 300000 customers and then only 100 customers turn up, I have wasted much of my expenditure because it's useless. If I buy a dynamic amount of hard disk space from a cloud service on demand, then I have not wasted that money.
So, clearly, opportunity cost has a lot to do with utilization if you assume a positive connection between utilization and profit, which you apparently don't. Go ask any airline about it :)
> If you deny any link between benefits and utilization, then I understand your argument.
I deny it because there isn't any link - "excess" resources don't reduce benefits.
> But I think your argument is wrong because it contradicts the very purpose of buying capital goods.
The purpose of buying capital goods is to receive more benefits than the costs incurred, the metric being benefits-costs/costs. (Note - benefits are not profit.)
Benefits don't depend on utilization. (While the amount of money that 100 people will pay me to fly them from NYC to LA might depend on how full their plane is, it isn't affected by me having 1 vs 1e6 planes parked in AZ.)
Utilization can affect costs, but the connection isn't always strong.
For example, my PC could usually get by with 400MB of ram. However, several times a year, I get significant benefit from having 1GBy. That benefit easily exceeds the cost of 500MBy of ram, even the "utilization" of said extra ram is low. (And no, the cost of renting ram when I need it isn't less.)
Note that the "utilization is key" argument would suggest that I'd be better off with 400MB of RAM than 500MB. That's clearly absurd because 400MB costs more than 500MB.
And then there's the difibrillator example. If I only use it once, is it useless?
You're misunderstanding me. The link between benefits and utilization is that in order to gain future benefits you spend a certain amount on capital goods, based on your expectation of utilization. You must have an idea of utilization because that's what determines cost and hence profit. That's the link I was talking about and it doesn't contradict your parked airplanes example at all.
The original question we were discussing was whether buying excess resources was economically sustainable. I think we can agree that economic sustainability depends on profits. Higher costs reduce profits and therefore threaten economic sustainability.
Now, you say the connection between utilization and costs is not always strong. No, it's not always strong, but it is strong enough for entire industries to focus on exactly that issue.
People are fired right now because they cannot be "utilized". Planes are rented away so they do not rot in AZ hangars. It's because machines lose value over time. Owning them without being able to make money out of them means you lose money every month. So spare capacity becomes a huge problem if growth doesn't meet expectations.
Paying only for the resources you actually use increases flexibility and reduces costs. If your expectations are wrong, you haven't spent the money buying the hardware either. Many dot coms would've been very happy to accept that logic in 2000.
But of course you pay a premium for that flexibility and if it turns out your growth expectations were right, you may have been better off not paying that flexibility premium. It's an insurance contract against the risk of wrong expectations.
> You're misunderstanding me. The link between benefits and utilization is that in order to gain future benefits you spend a certain amount on capital goods
I'm not misunderstanding you at all. I'm pointing out that your terminology is non-standard and inconsistent.
There is no link between benefits and utilization. Utilization only affects costs.
> Now, you say the connection between utilization and costs is not always strong. No, it's not always strong,
The original claim was that low utilization was always unsustainable. Conceding that the relationship between utilization and costs is not always strong is an admission that said claim was wrong. It is strong in some circumstances but not others.
The specific example was mostly idle computers, the claim being that having an idle computer is unsustainable.
> Paying only for the resources you actually use increases flexibility and reduces costs.
Not always. Consider my home PC. I could have gotten one less powerful for somewhat less money. The less powerful one would suit my needs much of the time. Moreover, said computer is idle much of the time. However, the costs of trying to optimize for utilization are significantly higher than the costs of just having a reasonable computer, even though the utilization is low.
The problem with the "actually use" argument is that there are costs associated with flexibility. That's why I mentioned 400MB of ram. (Which reminds me - that use of "flexibility" is somewhat idiocynratic. Having 1GB of ram is more flexible than having 200mb and going out and renting 800mb on demand.)
However, that's just me. So, let's find out if you're any different. Do you own any devices that are significantly underutilized? Why?
I forgot about your difibrillator example. If you actually use it it's not useless. If you don't use it you can say with hindsight that it was indeed useless (apart from giving you peace of mind maybe).
But it's a bad example because you don't own more or less defibrillator. Either you own one or you don't. And then it's not an ecoomic question. Because the answer to the question what is the right price for saving my life is always the same: All I have, all I can borrow and all I can steal.
I like ZumoDrive, but I can't understand why anybody in their right mind would want all of their stuff in "the cloud". I'm still not comfortable with anything in the cloud, though I cautiously make an exception with Zumo because I want all my music everywhere, dammit.
To me, cloud-based storage is a convenience that should never be completely relied on or trusted to reliably store or give access to anything. And it surely should not be considered secure, unless all my data is heavily encrypted in transit and storage.
To me, cloud-based storage is a convenience that should never be completely relied on or trusted to reliably store or give access to anything.
This is true, but unfortunately it is also true of a hard drive sitting in your home attached to your computer. Hard drives break; computers can go crazy and corrupt your hard drives; hard drives burn in fires and get zapped by electrical surges and become soaked in floods. Moreover, the slow upload bandwidth from your home severely restricts your access to the data stored there when you're on the road, even if you're a master of SSH tunneling and the power doesn't glitch.
The big thing that convinced me to embrace online backup is the burglary scenario. If a burglar enters your home, it doesn't matter how many copies of your data you have on local hard drives, or whether or not those hard drives are kept connected and running. The burglar is liable to take everything.
You can make offsite backups on physical hard drives that you physically move from place to place. I'm too cheap to pay S3 to store my ripped CDs and recorded TV shows, so that's what I do for such things. But it's a lot of work, and I'm always behind.
As for the encryption issue: Is all the data in your home encrypted? The odds of one of my local hard drives being stolen are probably larger than the odds of my encrypted data on S3 being cracked. Yet I don't encrypt my home drives (except for tiny bits of data like my stored passwords) because I fear that the odds of my misrecording the key, or of something getting corrupted, are in turn far larger than the odds of me really caring when a thief makes off with the top-secret MP3 files of my niece singing Happy Birthday.
I should have clarified: I think online backups are a great idea (provided they're encrypted archives). The author of the article says, quote, I don’t want to mess around with personal storage. Personal storage on-device is like buying your own power station for your house. Anyone who carries round their data WITH them is living in the wrong century.
This is a different thing entirely. He's basically saying that personal hard drives are obsolete as a storage medium, which I find incredibly preposterous. The "century" doesn't matter; the Internet is nowhere near ubiquitous around the globe, and I imagine it never truly will be. Of course there are other concerns: bandwidth, security, fly-by-night companies, etc.
I'll be the first to admit that if you burnt down my apartment right now, the only stuff that would be saved is code for projects I'm currently tracking. I do hourly backups, but they're all done to a local drive. Everyone, including me, should have off-site backups if they have important information on their computer hard drives. That's something I think everyone could agree on.
He's basically saying that personal hard drives are obsolete as a storage medium...
I don't think that argument is preposterous at all. I'm halfway there, already, even with my anemic cable internet connection. It just requires a shift in thinking. You may look at my setup and say "you're storing data in a personal hard drive and backing it up online over a fairly slow internet connection". But someone else could look at the very same setup and say "you're storing your data online, but because your data connection is kind of slow, you're keeping a big local cache in a personal hard drive."
It's not as if the distinction between storage and backup and cache is necessarily cut and dried. They're amorphous and fluid categories. If called upon to distinguish between them, I'd probably claim that "primary storage" is a label for "whichever medium is most durable" -- in which case it's not at all clear that the cloud isn't more "primary" than my hard drive. There are risks and downsides to storing cloud data (bandwidth, security, fly-by-night companies), but there are also risks to storing local data (crashes, security, fly-by-night system administration :), and it's unclear which is better. The best thing is to diversify and keep copies in several places.
I would never refer to my iPhone as "storage": I conceptualize it as a cache, a subset of my data that I carry around with me only because the network is slow, not ubiquitous, and not always trustworthy. I now treat my laptop the same way. If I weren't too cheap to buy a whole terabyte of S3 storage, I might well come to think of all my local machines as nothing but local caches of my S3 data, as well as local backups in case S3 gets taken over by Skynet or IP lawyers or some other threat to humanity.
Even though cloud storage is getting cheaper, it's still not as cheap as off of the shelf hard drives (yet). But then again, you can't access your hard drive from anywhere, and it's not stored at geographically different locations.
Then when it comes to your mobile devices, sometimes it's not possible to add additional capacity. You are paying for something different than a hard drive. Cloud storage will get cheaper, just as the harddrives have
Well, a data center using lots of drives can probably use more of the space on them. It wouldn't be unusual for an individual person only to fill up 1/10 of his hard drive. It would be less common for a data center to have 10x overcapacity.
If they wanted to be really clever, they could also analyze the data when it's uploaded and encode it in a less redundant way... for instance, it's quite likely that large numbers of people will have very similar mp3 files... if you could figure out that 99% of a certain file is exactly identical to 99% of another file, why store that data twice?
But, that gets very complicated... you're just shifting the hard drive costs into developer and cpu costs... so it may not be economical.
Clouds must markup. They can't charge the same prices or they are merely covering hardware expenses, which doesn't cover personnel expenses, let alone profit.
Fortunately you can get some premium value out of that markup that is way more expensive to set up yourself. (In particular multiple backup sites.) But the cheapest storage solution absent all other concerns will always be simple local storage.
Agreed. As someone who sells online backups by the byte, I should be trying to get people to back up all the data they have -- but as I routinely point out to people, some stuff really doesn't need offsite backup. If your house burns down, there are lots of things you're going to be upset about losing; a collection of downloaded MP3s probably isn't one of them.
I disagree. Losing my MP3 collection would mean losing part of my identity I had over the years.
It's really interesting/funny to look at the different stuff and say to yourself "Did I really like this? Did I really go to concerts from these bands?"
But of course, the cat/dog and the girlfriend would need to get out of the burning appartment first :)
Agreed. In fact, one of my friends lost over 1TB of painstakingly collected mp3s (mostly scene stuff, prog house, techno, sets, etc), and was devastated by the loss. It took him over 10 years to assemble that collection.
On the contrary, one of the top 5 things I do want backed up is my MP3s; I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on them. But I probably don't want to back them up over the Internet.
Any backup service that won't accept encrypted blobs is worthless. Any cloud backup software that doesn't make that easy in both directions is also worthless.
Even paying for the software and additional technology this looks expensive to me. Amazon S3 price for this would be $20/month for the storage (plus transfer costs of $0.15/gb) so I think it could be cheaper
Exactly. Buy storage, hook up mobile device to it over a VPN, then map a network drive - done, exactly same end result, but no cloud dependency and no recurrent monthly fees.
ZumoDrive is not going to change anything. From box.net to liveMesh there are simple to complex solutions. With Live Mesh you not only can access your 'share' from anywhere you can also remote login to your home PC from anywhere and vice versa (yeah access office PC from home even across firewall).
Perhaps if you're in a connectivity rich part of the world this cloud storage and computing stuff is alluring but for those of us with imperfect connectivity it represents more inconvenience not less.
There is no doubt that there are a lot of people who will use this - but it's not yet ready for mainstream. It's much easier to store you stuff on an external hard drive than on Zumo, and till it becomes easier, this will not really hit.
The startup will be profitable very quickly, they will gain hundreds of thousands of users, but ZumoDrive does not represent any big change in computing... for now.