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.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The end of local storage. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Kindle Lawsuit

In my last entry, I pointed to the case of Justin Gawronski, who was mentioned almost as an aside in the New York Times article about Amazon deleting legally purchased and downloaded content from their users’ Kindle devices. At the time, I suspected that the deletion of annotations could eventually lead to lawsuits:

Beyond the irony of Amazon throwing a book like Nineteen Eighty Four down the memory hole (a large incinerator in that book), Amazon’s action raise troubling questions as to the ability of online providers to remove content they have not created. I leave it to legal scholar to assess whether Amazon could actually be considered to have infringed on the intellectual property rights of people whose annotations were removed along with the books.

Today, news comes out that this student is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Amazon, making this the first legal case to test what a cloud-based provider can and cannot do with legitimately purchased content. The complaint uses language similar to what I talked about:

2. With an uncanny knack for irony, Amazon recently remotely deleted any traces of
certain electronic copies of George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” from customers’
Kindles and iPhones, thereby sending these books down Orwell’s so-called “memory hole.”

[…]

16. On or about July 16 and 17, 2009, Amazon withdrew from sale certain e-books,
including George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm.” Amazon then remotely deleted these ebooks
from purchasers’ Kindles and iPhones. In doing so, Amazon not only deleted the e-books,
but also rendered useless any electronic notes and annotations that consumers had made within
these e-books because the notes were no longer tied to the referenced or highlighted text.

While I had initially thought that the content was deleted, it turns out that the annotations are still available on the device, albeit without any context to them, which is what the lawsuit is now testing:

54. Plaintiff Gawronski and the Big Brother Work-Product Subclass suffered
damages because they created content on their Kindles within the purchased content that
Amazon deleted.

Most surprising is that the lawsuit did not look at Amazon’s infringement of its customer’s rights under the first sale doctrine. The first sale doctrine, which has been in place since the beginning of the 20th century, basically states that purchases can transfer a lawfully acquired copy of a copyrighted work without requiring permission from the copyright holder. Many people interpret this to mean that:

the copyright holder’s rights to control the change of ownership of a particular copy end once that copy is sold, as long as no additional copies are made. This doctrine is also referred to as the “first sale rule” or “exhaustion rule.”

It could be argued that, by taking the book away from its users, Amazon has controlled the ownership of a particular copy that had already been sold, even though no additional copy was made. It was surprising to not see the lawsuit also incorporating this point as it is probably one of the larger legal infrigements Amazon could be charged with when it comes to that incident.

The Apple Store and iPhone community

Meanwhile, while there are no legal rumblings yet around Apple’s treatment of its development community. With every incident of an app being denied access, it appears that a few more developers decide that, while the platform is exciting to use, developing for the iPhone is not worth the trouble. If it were one case, that could be considered a disgruntled developer; if it were two, that could also be ignored; but with every new incident, it appears another developer or group of developer decides that they’d rather not develop for the platform.

When I was in journalism school, we were told that when there is a high similarity between three different events in a very short time, we ought to pay closer attention as it could be a trend. When that similarity pops over and over again, as in the case of the iPhone development community, it seems like a slow grumble is turning into something more potent.

But of course, one could argue that such grumbles are really nothing to worry about, as long as Apple can continue growing its user base. After all, the company makes more money selling devices that it does from the revenue generated by the app store.

True to some extent but that particular issue starts falling on its face when one considers two important facts:

1. Selling applications through the App Store is probably a more profitable business (as costs associated to the sale, as represented by a percentage of the revenue is probably lower than it would be on hardware).
2. Prominent users are starting to complain loudly.

Of course, none of this is going to single handedly stop the growth of the iPhone but what is increasingly appearing is that Apple is having a potential communication challenge on its hands. A single disgruntled developer or disgruntled user cannot bring the product down but a continuous stream of complaints starts creating the appearance of wrong-doing, potentially undermining the long term success of the offering.

Apple is still thought of by the majority of the people as a cool company (as Google and Microsoft once were), a shinning beacon highlighting the power of innovation and capitalism. As it grows marketshare, what was once considered OK as a way to help the company compete against larger players (the aforementioned Microsoft) is increasingly being considered as arrogant and evil.

What does it all mean?

Of course, at this point, if you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering how this is an example of a new hope. The new hope is arising out of the fact that a largely quiet population is now starting to fight back against the over-reach of large corporations into what level of controls such corporations will be able to excert. In the case of Amazon, the class action has the potential of redefining what a company can and cannot do with a purchase device. Such decision could also establish some precedents as to the use of kill-switches in electronic devices (or invertly, give large corporations more power and legally codify the level of control they have been afforded).

In the public arena, the push-back Apple is encountering from both its developer and early adopter communities could help establish new boundaries as to what is and isn’t accepted in terms of controlling access through online gateways (in the case of Apple, that gateway is the App store but one could argue that the social rules established around the App store could eventually extend to the kind of perception around what is and isn’t acceptable in terms of consumer ISPs blocking internet sites).

With each event, the online community is also establishing some precedent as to what will be considered acceptable in an environment where all data is stored not a user’s machine but on some remote corporate server.

In each of these individual cases, awareness is raised and with every other skirmish, more people become aware of the issues at stake. It is my belief that, as more people become aware, more people will require less corporate control and more individual control. And that gives me hope.

Update: The government is now looking into Apple’s removal of Google Voice related apps from their App store. This is getting interesting.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Cloud Wars — A New Hope. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.