The End of .Mac and Google Apps?

mattnyc99 writes "In his weekly tech column for Popular Mechanics, Glenn Derene predicts that everyone will have a home server to network their house within 10 years—rendering Apple's .Mac accounts and Google's productivity software useless. As prices for products like HP's MediaSmart Server drop and as processing power becomes more pervasive, Derene says, 'you'll ultimately need a centralized server—that high-powered traffic cop—to coordinate the non-stop exchange of information between your new multitude of devices.'"

Not web based...

[DTemp]

I hope they don't plan on this server having a web-based interface to the outside world, because right now many ISPs (including mine, Comcast) forbid people from running web servers, and most actually block access to port 80 on their customer's lines.

I'm hoping that will change, I hope I can use my internet line for whatever (legal) stuff I want in the future...

I also hope my upload speed becomes as fast as my download speed, instead of the current 768kbps compared to 6.6mbps, but thats another story...

That's not what TFA says

[niceone]

Hmm, the summary says we'll have home servers "rendering Apple's .Mac accourendering Apple's .Mac accounts and Google's productivity software uselessnts and Google's productivity software useless".

But TFA's only mention of Google or .Mac says:

The technorati among you may protest: Why do we need home servers when everything is migrating online? Google has a full suite of productivity software available that works through a Web browser, and services like .Mac function as an online virtual server for home and small business users without bringing IT problems home. Combine that with a general trend toward higher bandwidth, and the distinction between your network and the Internet becomes almost academic. Nevertheless, the end result is the same: a server massive, networked, securely backed up and well-managed storage that is accessible from anywhere.

which is not the same thing at all.

Re:Been there, done that

[MadnessASAP]

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/ [bell-labs.com]Plan 9 It's .com not .org. But thanks for pointing that out anyways.

Re:Not web based...

[DTemp]

But see, here's the thing: You can set up a web server on whatever port you want, and be clever and get it to work. However you're still (I think) in violation of your customer agreement with Comcast, because they don't want you to have a web server, any HTTP/HTTPS access, on ANY PORT period. So you might get around their port 80 block, but if they were to find you out, they could still do anything from sending you a friendly notice to stop, to shut down your service.

Re:That's not what TFA says

[im_thatoneguy]

Yeah but try moving 2TB of data over to your .Mac or Google datahosting solution.

The future is in rich media. People are amassing vast volumes of data every day. The future is a system in which they can access all of the data instantaneously. The webbandwidth curve and the home storage capacity are not in sync. This is why it's still a hastle to upload a 100MB file but the average user seems to have 100GB of movies.

Just my My Documents folder is something like 60GB. There is no way I'm going to upload that to the internet anytime soon, and yet the strength of an online system is when all of the data is available not just a small selection. You can never know when you need that rendering from June of 2003 that you thought you would never need again.