Appears the cloud will be the way we share any and all data. I just received this e-mail.. It'll be interesting so see where this next greatest concept ends up taking us.... Stay tuned.....................right?
It's google docs done by Apple. I expect it's going to be very well done. Since they wrote their OS' browser (Safari), and the WWW site hosting the apps, they can customize the user experience. Google has been doing this with Chrome already, but Google's UI is butt ugly.
The Cloud was produced at the "request" of US spy agencies, and is designed so the "targets" (All US Citizens) not only voluntarily hand over every detail of their lives to the government but actually organize and label it for them.
In the olden days, you would create a computer program on punched cards and submit them to the computer operator who'd run your program and put the resulting printout in your (physical) mailbox. Then they came up with the idea of dumb serial terminals. They would talk to a central mainframe computer over an RS232 cable. The terminal simply showed the characters on the screen where and what the mainframe told it to. Then they came up with the idea of personal computers. They shifted the work load from a centralized source (mainframe) to apps you store on your local hard disk and run from there. When they updated the word processor on the old mainframe, everyone got to use the new version. With the PCs, some people are still running windows XP and god knows what versions of the various software. Along came google. In the process of crawling every WWW page on the Internet, they grew a network (cloud!) of computers that combined had so much RAM that a copy of every page on the internet could be in RAM in their cloud. That was a long time ago. They now have many times that computing capacity. The cloud is a mainframe way of distributing software. Apple gets to update their software on their servers at 3AM and tomorrow you get to use the new software. At least apple does its software updates mostly right. The app store app tells you that you have some locally installed software to update, and you click a button to install the latest and greatest. Unlike Windows where everything you download and install also installs a program that runs in the background checking for software updates for just the one program.
