Just for the sake of discussion suppose this guy is right.

http://www.zdnet.com/cloud-haters-you-too-will-be-assimilated-7000012059/?s_cid=e539


Note that he thinks the gaming computer will be dead (too small a market) and only specialized "legacy" applications will be available for such things as video editing (he does not say what kind of machine such apps would run on) and of course he does not even mention audio applications.

If he is right, the era of affordable up to date audio processing may be ending in our lifetime. Will we be returning to the days when studios have $100 K purpose built audio editing hardware?

Can Sonar be ported to the smartphone?

I think a hybrid approach is inevitable.  Some core local services (i.e. local processing and ability to seamlessly operate offline) and some cloud-based services and storage.  Which is basically how most of our smartphones and tablets operate anyway.

It will never be "just cloud" nor "just local".  

I don't believe this article is saying it'll be the former, but the inference is there in the title (or might be misunderstood that way).  

Btw, the other day I had a song idea but was away from my home studio, so I used an app on my phone to capture the essence of it.  Later I did a bit more on my tablet (the song idea was "just there" courtesy of it automatically being updated to the cloud).  Later still, and I'm editing it in my home studio.  This was all pretty cool, but cooler still was that later I had more ideas for the same song when I was away from my studio -- so I just picked up right where I left off on the phone, and it already had the updates I'd made on the tablet and PC.  

Now that's a cool and seamless way to work.

I don't think renting/leasing software/hardware will become the norm. It costs too much. Sure, you get the run the latest stuff, but you're forced to upgrade every month/year, etc. I know for a fact there are still people out there running Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 because it does what they want and they don't need anything more.

So we may see more cloud services offered, but I don't see everyone making the conversion. Unless of course, companies eventually decide to stop providing products for sale and everyone is forced to move to the cloud.

No one really knows what the future holds...

Scott

--
Scott R. Garrigus - http://garrigus.com - SONAR X2 Power! - http://garrigus.com/?SonarX2Power
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar and Sony Sound Forge Power book series: http://garrigus.com/?PowerBooks
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar ProAudioTutor video tutorial series: http://garrigus.com/?ProAudioTutor
* Publisher of the DigiFreq free music technology newsletter: http://digifreq.com/?DigiFreq
* Publisher of the NewTechReview free consumer technology newsletter: http://newtechreview.com/?NewTechReview

At least when the software doesn't work we'll have someone other than ourselves to blame.

I think the idea of storing data on the cloud is mainly for small devices of today. I believe that storage technology will continue to evolve and the notion of needing to store anything on a "cloud" will be a need in search of a purpose.  

What we're seeing is the emergence of a new technology, and a new demographic/market opportunities, not a replacement.

Of course, there will be migration of folks who are currently "making do" with the current tech, who will be very happy to migrate to the new one. But the old one isn't going away, just shrinking, or "concentrating".

John


I think the idea of storing data on the cloud is mainly for small devices of today. I believe that storage technology will continue to evolve and the notion of needing to store anything on a "cloud" will be a need in search of a purpose.  

I think the point of the article is not that storage will move to the cloud (as it already has) in order to accommodate the deliberate shrinking of storage in mobile devices, but that computation, i. e. the running of programs themselves, will be done on distant servers. The latency problem this poses for audio processing of the type we now do on our PC's with Sonar etc.are probably insurmountable. Although the rapidity of data transmission measured as bandwidth (total number of MB moved per second) will undoubtedly increase with time, the delay from first byte send to first byte arrival and return time is less amenable to improvement. It is that "travel" time that currently complicates real time audio coordination, like having an orchestra of performers in different cities play together.

Of course, there will be migration of folks who are currently "making do" with the current tech, who will be very happy to migrate to the new one. But the old one isn't going away, just shrinking, or "concentrating".

I agree, and for the reason that things like audio processing will require aspects of the old technology to work. The problem with the shrinking or concentrating of that old technology is the loss of economies of scale. Imagine if you will that the current market for PC components was reduced to .01% of its current size (which probably grossly overestimates the proportion of PC users who require DAW capabilities). What would change in the cost of such PC's in order to make the same profit?

This is not new technology it is old technology applied in a new way. Remote computing is a very old concept. And as for running programs remotely nothing new there either. Anyone remember terminals? I for one do not want to return to that way of doing things. 

The use of the "cloud" for real time processing isn't going to come for decades, for one primary reason: the internet backbone and connections available to the average joe will not support it.  Rolling new infrastucture is expensive and time consuming, not to mention the American telco's are in no rush to improve what we have now.  Then when we all have fat fiber pipes to match the transfer rates our local drives can do, the latency will still be too high unless we move away from TCP/IP and onto some new protocol.

There's plenty of technology to do this now... but that doesn't really matter until it's cheap and widely available for everyone.  I agree that the old school workstation market is shrinking fast, but I don't think it's going away for a long time.