The end of local storage

Look­ing at longer term trends, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that record­able CDs, DVDs, and USB dri­ves are going the way of the dodo and will be mostly gone from the tech land­scape by 2020. Along with them, things like recorded DVDs will dis­ap­pear, upend­ing much of the exist­ing dig­i­tal con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion models.

An abbre­vi­ated his­tory of storage

Any­one who has used a com­puter has found them­selves in the same sit­u­a­tion: at some point, they have needed to take infor­ma­tion off the com­puter in order to share it on another computer.

In the old days, this was done via diskettes, which were replaced by CDs, and even­tu­ally CDs were dis­placed by record­able DVDs and USB solid-state drives.

In the cor­po­rate (or pro­sumer) mar­ket, larger data needs led to the use of ZipDisk, Syquest dri­ves, and even­tu­ally file servers.

As house­hold increased their exper­tise in the tech space, we’ve seen the rise of Net­work Acces­si­ble Stor­age (NAS) devices for home use (for exam­ple, the pop­u­lar Apple Time Cap­sule or the WD MyBook series).

Devices vs. Desktops

But over the last few years, the stor­age land­scape has grown more com­pli­cated. As more con­sumers carry smart­phones, portable media play­ers, dig­i­tal cam­eras, and cam­corders, or play dig­i­tal con­tent down­loaded for their tele­vi­sions, the com­puter is loos­ing its dom­i­nance on usage of dig­i­tal media. And, along the way, the com­puter is no longer the hub of every­thing dig­i­tal in the household.

Dig­i­tal con­tent is now spread across that wide array of devices and will become increas­ingly unteth­ered from the com­puter to the point where some house­hold may remain heavy con­sumer of dig­i­tal media with­out even own­ing a computer.

Mean­while, in the busi­ness world, con­tent sit­ting on employ­ees’ com­put­ers is hard to find and harder to con­trol. Lap­tops can walk away from a com­pany with cru­cial com­pany con­tent on their hard dri­ves so there’s an increase push to get users to save their infor­ma­tion on cen­tral­ized servers.

Enters the cloud

How­ever, along with the spread of devices, there has been a grow­ing spread in avail­able band­width at higher speed. A decade ago, the major­ity of inter­net users were access­ing it at speed of about 56kbps. Today, that num­ber has gone up 100-fold and will con­tinue to go up (by some esti­mate, the 100Mbps mark will be stan­dard by 2020.)

With extra band­width to spare, data can now be stored more effi­ciently on remote servers.

In the con­sumer space, peo­ple are increas­ingly stor­ing their videos on YouTube or Flickr, their images on Flickr and Face­book, and other files on the likes of Google Docs. Social net­works are becom­ing a large repos­i­tory of backup data that can be shared with friends or locked away.

And today, some solu­tions are allow­ing for such things to hap­pen auto­mat­i­cally from the devices to the web. For exam­ple, I use Eye.fi cards in most of my cam­eras, which dynam­i­cally upload the con­tent of the cam­era to the online service(s) of my choice. They also have soft­ware based solu­tions that run on the iPhone and Android devices. Pix­elpipe, one of their com­peti­tors, is soft­ware based only.

In the enter­prise space, com­pa­nies like drop­box, drop.io, and box.net pro­vide solu­tions that store the files on their servers and allow end-users to access them from any com­puter or mobile devices.

Cre­ation, Dis­tri­b­u­tion, Consumption

Up until recently, I was pretty opposed to the iPad as a device, see­ing it as a con­sump­tion only device. Over the last few months, as more tools have become avail­able, we’ve seen a slew of tools allow­ing peo­ple to use the iPad in cre­ative ways. My blind spot was to equal stor­age with cre­ation and assum­ing that con­tent was not stored locally, it would be issue from a cre­ation standpoint.

But I was wrong.

In today’s world, con­tent that sits locally is pretty much as good as dead. It is not dis­trib­uted and thus is not con­sumed. This epiphany came to me not as a result of using an ipad but while author­ing a story for my site. I real­ized that I was open­ing up my browser and launch­ing a web app to do so. The same had been true for most of my week and I often can go days with­out open­ing a desk­top app other than my browser. As a result, I’ve con­cluded that local stor­age is becom­ing increas­ingly irrelevant.

What is still rel­e­vant, though, is the exis­tence of some form of local stor­age. In the future, local stor­age will be used pri­mar­ily to hold con­tent and appli­ca­tion on a tem­po­rary basis before said con­tent and app return to the cloud. The rea­son for such an approach is that run­ning appli­ca­tion locally will always be more effi­cient than run­ning them over a net­work link.

Impact on con­sumer electronic

Prob­a­bly more impor­tant is the final impact on dig­i­tal media. The iPod was rev­o­lu­tion­ary in that it did away with the stan­dard model of dis­tri­b­u­tion for music: CDs are increas­ingly get­ting replaced by dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion and may con­tinue to exist as a spe­cial­ized domain (much like there are still some LP record pur­chasers today.)

The Kin­dle (and its com­peti­tors in the e-reader cat­e­gory) are start­ing to do the same thing to mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers and books.

The iPad takes music, books, mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, TV shows, and other video con­tent and runs them through a sin­gle device.

The same thing is about to hap­pen to all video con­tent. Today, com­pa­nies like Net­flix shuf­fle a lot of plas­tic back and forth so the plas­tic piece can be played on a spe­cial­ized device (either a DVD or Blu­Ray player) and then returned. Net­flix has seen the writ­ing on the wall and is increas­ingly try­ing to push its users (and providers) to move to a plastic-free world by stream­ing the media directly to the device of their choice. Much like kids today may not really under­stand the con­cept of rewind­ing a video tape, the kids of tomor­row will not under­stand the idea of putting some­thing into a machine in order to play it.

As stream­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion becomes more com­mon, atti­tudes towards the disks will change so that such things are only cater­ing to a much smaller audience.

My five-year-old son looks at DVDs as some­thing you can dec­o­rate in art projects, not some­thing you can play. His view is that every­thing is avail­able on demand either via my com­puter, smart­phone, or our con­nected TV (Try explain­ing to a 5-year-old that Wall-E is not avail­able because it’s out­side the release win­dow set by the stu­dios). With the advent of Apple TV and Google TV, his expe­ri­ence is about to become more common.

He’s the con­sumer of tomor­row and his view is that stor­age is some­thing that hap­pens in the cloud. In his teenage years, he might end up look­ing at USB dri­ves with the same dis­dain as we look at videotapes.