Cloud services compared
Cloud computing is no longer the future – it's here. Chances are you already use web-based email, store some or all of your music, photos or videos online, or even just stream your televisual entertainment to your living room straight from the internet.
We are slowly being encouraged to store less and less of our content on our own hard drives, and instead entrust it to the servers of a few corporate giants.
Whether you're uploading photos and movies to Facebook, videos to YouTube, saving and sharing work in Google docs, downloading music using your iTunes account or reading books using your Kindle, your details and data are mainly held in the cloud, and it's a revolution that's growing.
It's going to affect you in other ways too, as more and more companies – and even governments and councils – are considering using cloud computing to provide the hosting and compute power for their services.
Using the cloud is often cheaper, more adaptable and surprisingly, more reliable than running their own servers. Even a couple of years ago, cloud services were seen as something not to be trusted as a substitute for your own backups, but now the world is embracing cloud computing as never before.
From the office to the sofa, the cloud is powering our document creations tools, our calendars, our address books and even our viewing and gaming experiences, and with the advent of high-speed broadband allowing apps to handle ever more involved processes and deliver them to us on low-powered devices, it doesn't take a lot of future-gazing to see that online is the future.
Entertainment revolution
There is a new revolution coming to cloud computing as well – the entertainment revolution. This year has seen many companies competing to offer cloud services to buy, store and stream your entertainment collections for you. You aren't just backing up your content to the cloud – you often haven't downloaded it at all.
Amazon, Apple and Google want to store your music, films and books on their cloud servers, and will let you stream them to your internet-connected devices. All you need is your browser to get to all your entertainment services wherever you are.
So which company should you turn to for your cloud computing services? Where should you entrust your beloved music, films and book collections? And what else are these companies planning in the future to make your life more secure, easier and stress-free?
We've taken a close look at four major players in the burgeoning field of personal cloud services – Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google – and asked which one is for you, or will be soon.
Cloud services compared: Google
Google's often-stated mission is 'to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful', and what better way to do this than by putting everything online?
But nowadays Google isn't just about information – it's also about applications that can store, display and manipulate that information in useful ways.
Google has been moving everyone onto its cloud web servers for years. If you use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Picasa or YouTube, you are already putting your data onto its cloud servers. With only a login between you and your content on any internet-connected device, Google can truly lay claim to not only seeing the future of computing as web-based, but actually making it happen.
Google makes no bones about this. When PC Plus asked Robert Whiteside, head of Google Enterprise UK, Ireland and Benelux, how important cloud computing is for Google, he told us: "Google is taking a '100 per cent web' approach to all our services and solutions, meaning we believe applications will be browser based and hosted in the cloud, rather than in a desktop environment."
Google's cloud computing is already a success. As Robert is keen to point out, "Over four million organisations use Google Apps, our flagship cloud product." And that number is increasing by 5,000 companies every day (up from 3,000 a day last year).
Google is even stealing the march on companies targeting businesses, with cloud-based collaborative office products that even Microsoft can't match.
Cloud, what cloud?
Google has been very good at getting ordinary people to use cloud computing without them thinking of it as such. Most people accept the usefulness of Gmail and Google Calendar without worrying that the data contained on these services is saved in one of Google's server farms dotted around the world.
Google is so reliable (it has a non-failure rate of 99.948 per cent – approximately a mere seven minutes of downtime a month) that people don't even think about backing up their emails or Google Docs to their PCs.
Most companies see the cloud as a backup solution, but Google was one of the first to see further than that. In 2009, Google Docs came out of beta and allowed anyone to create documents in the cloud via a web browser for free.
When Google Docs first appeared it was clunky and felt half finished, but now the documents is produces are customisable, shareable and let numerous people edit the same document in real time – perfect for a work or collaborative project scenario. Google has blazed a trail that has left companies like Microsoft desperate to catch up.
It isn't all altruistic, of course. The more eyes Google gets looking at its web apps as opposed to desktop programs, the more money it can make. Hence the fact that Google has made so many cloud-based apps.
The list is being added to all the time; for example, there are Google Maps, Google Mail, Google Earth, Google Docs, Google Blogger, Google Site Manager, Google Contacts and the business offering Google Apps. All of these fill a niche, and often provide a free solution where before you would have had to buy a program or do without.
The downside to this is that Google also has a record of letting its less popular services dwindle away. These include Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google Labs, Google Health and Google Powermeter. This may seem like a sensible move if few people are using them, but it no doubt alienates those who do.
Content is key
Google knows that to keep people coming back, it needs to give them access to cloud-based entertainment as well as services – hence new additions like Google Books, Music and the film rentals now available from the Android market and YouTube.
Google has always dabbled with content – its ownership of YouTube and Picasa attests to that, as do its projects that aim to digitise books that are out of print and out of copyright, but now it wants you to rent or buy directly from Google, while still keeping the products in the cloud.
Google Books was brought to the UK in October 2011. As Google said, "Readers in the UK now have access to the world's largest ebook collection, with hundreds of thousands of ebooks for sale from major UK publishers like Hachette, Random House and Penguin, as well as more than two million public domain ebooks for free." These books are then stored in the cloud and accessible via any web browser.
Also introduced in October was the Android film streaming rental service. You can choose to rent any of thousands of films and watch them in any browser at any time within 30 days of purchase, with 48 hours to play with once you hit play. A similar service is available from YouTube.
There's also the US-only Google Music, which lets you buy from a list of 13 million songs. You can also upload up to 20,000 songs to its online library, and the service will automatically upload any music you add to your computer's music folders. This means you can then play these songs from any device with an internet connection – you can access your music wherever you go. This service is free, whereas Amazon and Apple charge an annual fee to store music not bought in their stores.
The future is the cloud, and Google has the infrastructure, the money to spend on research and the vision to ensure it continues providing free apps that are game-changing. It's not only keeping up with the trends in cloud computing, with free and paid-for entertainment, it's ahead of the curve, producing products like Chrome OS that rely solely on the web for their functionality.
Google is clearly the one to watch for the future of the cloud, and with Microsoft, Apple and Amazon following it closely, the need to keep innovating will ensure it keeps producing services and content with the potential to change how you use your computer forever.
The quiet Chromebook computing revolution
If there was ever any doubt which company is the true champion of cloud computing, Google need only hold up a Chromebook running Chrome OS. It's the only company to produce a computer with an operating system that gets almost all its functionality from the internet.
For the Chromebook, Google teamed up with Acer and Samsung to produce low-powered netbooks that, when switched on, are essentially full-screen web browsers that only run web apps. It really is a revolutionary idea – so much so that when the device was first released, Sergey Brin hailed the Chromebook as a "new model of computing".
Chromebooks have only minimal local storage, so you can't install programs like Microsoft Outlook, Word or Adobe Photoshop. But, Google argues, why would you need to when you can, and probably already do, use online programs with these functions for your day-to-day needs? Web apps will let you create documents and spreadsheet, edit pictures and watch movies – all you need is an internet connection.
The simple nature of the Chromebook makes it very fast to turn on too – in a mere eight seconds you'll be ready to surf the internet. We've seen this before, of course.
This is the idea of the thin-client: an under-powered computer you could take from workstation to workstation in an office so you could work anywhere, with office servers providing the processing grunt as opposed to the devices themselves. However, here the internet provides the connection to the servers making the whole world your office.
Sadly, their uptake is currently very limited. Most commentators feel it was too much too soon; that the world, and the internet, isn't ready for solely web-connected devices.
There are other issues too. The price of the Chromebook isn't that much lower that a normal netbook, and normal netbooks have the advantage that they can run all the web apps a Chromebook can, but still let you install other programs on to it.
The fact that you always need an internet connection could be severely limiting in certain situations. Imagine turning up at to pitch an idea to a company, finding there's no mobile signal in the office you are in and having to ask for access to their Wi-Fi so you can show them your work.
The idea has a lot going for it though, and as working in the cloud becomes a reality it may become a more attractive idea. Updates to Chrome OS can be automatically added to the Chromebook via the internet, ensuring you have the latest version of the OS at all times.
As Sergey Brin said at its launch: "Ultimately the most precious resource is the user's time. I think the complexity of managing your computer is really torturing users." The fact that most of the processing is done in the cloud extends the battery life to 8.5 hours, and if you lose your Chromebook, all your data, photos and files are still merely a login away.
So how worried is Google about the slow uptake of Chrome OS and the Chromebook? We asked Robert Whiteside, Head of Google Enterprise UK, Ireland and Benelux whether cloud-based operating systems like Chrome OS could still be the future.
"Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, so as more and more of us adopt cloud computing, its game-changing potential will only increase. Two or three years ago, a browser app looked second rate compared to a desktop application, but that isn't the case any more. A browser application can be very stable and rich."
At the moment we feel the Chromebook is a taste of the future that arrived a little too early, but watch this space…
Cloud services compared: Apple
With the release of iCloud, all of your Apple Devices are connected as never before. But what if you don't want to just use Apple for your computing?
Before Steve Jobs died, he made a very strong statement at the Worldwide Developers' Conference keynote in San Francisco: "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just being devices," he said. "We're going to move your hub, the centre of your digital life, into the cloud."
He was taking about the introduction of iCloud, a service that will automatically update all your Apple documents and iTunes purchases across your suite of Apple devices. Download a track from iTunes on your iPhone and it will be waiting for you on your Mac. Take a picture on your phone and you can show people the result almost instantly on your iPad. Start a presentation in Keynote at home and it will be waiting on your work Mac.
It uses the almost-always-connected nature of these devices in an integrated way. As Jobs said, "Today it's a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up to date across your devices. iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it's integrated into your apps you don't even need to think about it – it just works."
There should, however, have been a caveat to this. He was only talking about iOS devices – iOS 5 specifically. Poor old iOS 4 and Snow Leopard users aren't part of Apple's new iCloud gang, and neither are those who don't use Apple's software on their PCs.
Apple has always enjoyed ring-fencing its content to its own software and devices, and the iCloud experience is only for the iTunes set. If you have an Android phone, you won't be using any of these new services any time soon.
Similarly, although you can get iCloud support for iTunes on your PC, this isn't the same as just logging in to a browser-based version. You won't be able to listen to your music at work if your IT department won't let you install iTunes on your office desktop machine, for example.
Apple-only documents
iCloud isn't like Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox or SugarSync, which will let you back up anything. Only files created by iCloud-supporting applications will be synchronised to all your devices.
Neither is iCloud as free and easy as other cloud storage apps, which usually offer browser versions that let you download any of your files by logging into a website. Although there's a website for Apple's service at icloud.com, this just lets you see your mail, contacts and calendars.
You can't stream your entertainment content from the site – instead it's more of a backup for when things go wrong, giving you access to Apple's Find My iPhone service or merely letting you use the site to upload documents created on iCloud-enabled apps like Pages, Numbers and Keynote, not edit them online.
Of course, if you only use the latest Apple devices, these issues won't worry you and iCloud will be a fantastic free extra that puts the cloud to work for you. Some of the services are really fun and useful.
Take Photostream for example, the newest version of which takes the last 1,000 photos from your Apple device, saves them online for you to see on iCloud, and downloads them to all your devices when you switch them on. It will also let you pause supported games on your iPad and then continue later on your iPhone.
The free 5GB of iCloud storage for mail, documents and other backups isn't to be sneezed at, although it's not as generous as some other companies' offerings. That said, this limit isn't affected by any content bought from iTunes, so your Apple-bought music, apps and books are stored separately. Photostream photos don't count towards this 5GB, so the offer is more generous than it first seems.
Your music in the cloud
Some iCloud services are available in the US, but have yet to make their way to the UK. These include iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match.
iTunes in the Cloud lets you re-download previously bought content on to your newer gadgets at no additional cost, so everything you've bought is available on all your devices. iTunes Match will scan your entire iTunes library and replace each song not bought via iTunes (music you have ripped from a CD, for example) – even low bitrate versions – with 256kbps, DRM-free AAC versions. These can then be downloaded or streamed to all your other iOS5 products, basically putting your entire music library onto all your Apple devices.
iTunes Match is a subscription service. Unlike Google Music, which is free, Apple charges $25 (about £15) annually to upload and store music not purchased through iTunes. On the other hand, it's a very fast service compared with Amazon and Google's offerings – backing up your entire collection will take hours rather than days.
No song is excluded either; you can manually upload any song not listed in the 20 million-strong iTunes library. Another unusual thing about iTunes Match (which may mean it will take a while to get to the UK) is that Apple has obtained permission for the service from all the major music labels. Google and Amazon have gone for a more 'suck it and see' approach, describing their services as hard drives in the cloud and not seeking permission for the content – or only striking a deal with some labels.
Google and Amazon argue that the tunes are just data, but it could be said that Apple is on a more sound legal footing. It wouldn't be fun to upload your collection to Google or Amazon and then have access denied due to a legal ruling.
The death of MobileMe
It's no secret that Apple has a poor record when it comes to cloud computing. iCloud started as iTools in 2000, and became a much-mocked subscription service called MobileMe in 2008.
MobileMe is now being discontinued, to the chagrin of some dedicated users, with subscribers being transferred to iCloud. They are gaining all its new services, but losing some older MobileMe-only ones like the Gallery, iDisk, and iWeb publishing services.
Although iCloud is a revolation compared to these earlier offerings, Apple still isn't exploiting the full power of cloud computing. For Apple it's all about the content – films, books, TV and music. Microsoft and Google are all about online collaborative services, where people use the cloud not just for syncing, but for shared document creation online, while Apple has stuck to using it for content delivery.
The cloud means you no longer have to plug your iPad into your Mac to update it – it happens automatically and out of sight. This is admirable, but leaves a big hole in its functionality. Where are the online versions of Pages, Notes and Numbers? Why can't people collaborate on these programs using the cloud?
Anyone who needs this kind of service has to go to another company for it, and it may yet be to the detriment of Apple. In fact, it's already starting to show – Microsoft boasted that in November 2011, Hotmail was being used on two million iOS 5 devices, and was growing by 100K users per day. This may change once the full impact of iCloud is felt, or may be due to legacy use as more people switch to Apple from Microsoft devices, but Apple should be worried that people are sticking to its competitors' services.
A restricted hard drive
At the iCloud launch, Steve Jobs noted that "a lot of people think the cloud is just a hard drive in the sky." Clearly a lot of people do, and with iCloud Apple has challenged this idea by using it to store Apple-only documents.
Integration is key to true cloud computing; no one company can provide everything you want to do on a computing device. There has to be an opening for other company's technologies or people start to look elsewhere for a less restrictive service. This is a common complaint levelled at Apple.
The cynical see iCloud as just another way to encourage people to just buy more Apple devices, but is that really any different to the ring-fencing demonstrated by Amazon's Kindle Fire, or the bundling of all of Google's services from your Google home page?
Admittedly, the limits are a lot more delineated with iCloud, but if you have more than one iOS 5 device, there is little doubt that the convenience offered by iCloud and its associated services will be very attractive. If you only use Apple hardware and software, iCloud will give you everything you need.
Cloud services compared: Microsoft
Microsoft has a history of leading the field with cloud services, having launched MSN Messenger back in 1999 and Hotmail in 1997. Back then, getting a service like email for free was surprising and for the average person, the ability to access email from any internet-connected computer was groundbreaking.
In fact, because of this, Hotmail was launched on July 4, American Independence Day, to highlight the fact that it offered you independence from ISP-based email. Those days are long past, and Microsoft has spent years playing catch-up with other cloud services like those offered by Google.
Microsoft originally dismissed the likes of Google Docs as nothing to worry about, but that is clearly not the case. Microsoft has stepped up a gear in the last few years and may yet be a cloud computing force to be reckoned with.
Being last to the party isn't always a bad thing, especially if you happen to own the suite of office applications used by most of the world. Google may have made inroads into that audience, but people have trusted Microsoft with their office documents for decades. All Microsoft needs to do is offer the functionality that makes Google Docs so attractive, but designed to look like a trusted product.
Office online
This is where the paid-for versions of Microsoft 365 and the free personal consumer service SkyDrive with Web Apps come in.
Microsoft 365, launched in June 2011, is the latest version of the clumsily named Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). It's a subscription-based online version of Microsoft Office, offering online collaboration and document sharing for businesses.
Microsoft 365 is Microsoft's answer to Google Apps, albeit a more expensive one. There aren't a lot of figures available for its uptake yet, but in November 2011, Office division chief Kurt DelBene said: "We are seeing positive momentum for Office 365. Customers are adopting Office 365 eight times faster than our previous service, and it's on track to become one of the fastest growing offers in Microsoft's history."
Of more interest to the ordinary user are SkyDrive and Live Mesh. SkyDrive has been around since 2007, and offers 25GB of free online storage via Windows Live. It also lets you use Web Apps – cut-down versions of tools like Excel and Word – to collaborate online with others in the creation of Office documents.
However, Web Apps don't offer the real-time collaboration of Google Apps. For example, you won't see characters on the screen as people type them; instead you're frozen out of the piece of the document where someone is typing, and can only see those changes once that person saves their work and you refresh your screen.
However, the actual look of Web Apps is one most of us are used to seeing in Office. It takes a lot of effort for people to learn new icons and new styles, so Microsoft still has the upper hand at least in the familiarity of its product.
Live Mesh is a handy free service that lets you sync your files across multiple PCs and locations. Just download the Live Mesh client onto each PC you use, assign the folder you want to sync, and whatever changes you make to documents in that folder will be automatically synced to your SkyDrive and to the other PCs in your 'mesh' when they are switched on.
All work and no play
Microsoft is increasingly becoming seen as the business side of cloud computing, but if Apple and Google let you work as well as play, Microsoft could soon find itself left behind.
Not that it doesn't have entertainment-streaming cloud services – Zune Pass is a cloud-based evolution of Microsoft's Zune media players, which were designed as the company's answer to the iPod. It's a subscription-based service that lets you stream music and music videos to devices like Windows Phone 7 handsets, Xbox 360s, Windows PCs and Zune MP3 players. It lets you download TV programmes and rent films too.
At its launch in 2010, Craig Eisler, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business Group said: "The integration between Zune, Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Live is an exciting advance in our entertainment offering. Zune enables users access to the entertainment they want, wherever they want it – and now, more people than ever will be able to enjoy the freedom and flexibility that the Zune service offers."
Well, not quite wherever they want it. Zune can only be used on four Microsoft devices and doesn't support Android or iOS. Although there is an online version of the service at zune.net, it doesn't work in a web browser – you need to be on a machine with the software installed.
It's expensive too, costing £8.99 a month for the music streaming service, with an extra charge for TV and film rental.
Xbox Live without the Xbox
Microsoft has other online content available via Xbox Live, letting you watch films and TV using your Xbox 360 or Windows Phone 7 handset. It hasn't taken these technologies fully into the cloud, but there are rumours that Xbox Live may be integrated into Windows 8.
Speaking to the Seattle Times, Microsoft vice president Mike Delman said: "Live has been successful on the Windows Phone. Live will be built into the PC. It will be the service where you get your entertainment."
There are more developments coming for Xbox Live. According to some sources, Microsoft's developers are looking at services like Onlive, the service that has proved that high-powered gaming can be delivered to mobile devices via the internet, and may be planning something similar.
As Microsoft cloud developer Brian Prince said at the GDC China conference, "You will be seeing things in the Xbox platform that are cloud-specific. I'm already doing it, it's really exciting, but I can't tell you about it or else I'll get fired."
So the future of cloud computing could be rosy for Microsoft, even if its present isn't much to shout about. We aren't writing off Redmond just yet, even if we would probably look elsewhere for most of our cloud services at the moment.
Cloud services compared: Amazon
Amazon has a strong track record in the sphere of cloud computing, and is rapidly expanding its online services in the US. It's challenging its reputation as an online shop, albeit a huge one, and is diversifying into areas that could help you enjoy online services that are better than, on a par with, or totally unique compared with the biggest players in cloud computing.
Today it's one of the largest providers of cloud services in the world, challenging the likes of Google and Apple, and even pipping them to the post to launch new services like its music-streaming service, Cloud Player.
It's also championing a cloud-powered web browser called Silk, which uses Amazon's servers to load web pages so your device doesn't need to. Amazon could easily own cloud computing in the future, in much the same way it did in the past.
It was one of the first major companies to open up cloud computing to the masses over nine years ago. This wasn't through cloud services like webmail or online document creation, but by hiring out storage space and raw computing power.
In 2002, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company opened up the power of its unused servers to companies and individuals. It made sense – why should the company pay for all that server space and processing power that wasn't being used when there was a desperate need for it in other companies?
Later it refined this offering with Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), which allowed anyone to rent Amazon's spare server capacity by the hour. This is a truly adaptable service that lets companies expand and contract to match demand for their services without having to pay for extra servers that may be redundant the following month.
It's a flexible service that saves people money as customers are only charged for what they use, and its adaptability means businesses can grow in line with their needs without costly infrastructure investment. Despite concerns about storing private or business data in the cloud, EC2 has grown at an astonishing rate.
Cloud outage
In fact, some people's fears about the reliability of the cloud were apparently realised in April 2011 when an Amazon outage closed many sites, including Foursquare, Reddit and Quora, some of which were down for days.
Amazon released this statement after the outage: "We know how critical our services are to our customers' businesses and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services."
We're only in the first few years of the major uptake of cloud computing, so there are likely to be more teething issues and there seems to be little you can do about them other than having a backup system of your own – which does seem to defeat the purpose of using cloud computing.
Tellingly, no cloud computing firm currently offers insurance against lost data. Despite this, a global study carried out by IBM in 2011 said that over 60 per cent of organisations plan to "embrace cloud computing over the next five years".
But Amazon isn't all about business and web development. In 2011 it extended its cloud computing reach to include other, more personal services. It's catching up with (and even overtaking) the other big cloud players like Google and Apple by offering online film streaming through LoveFilm, online book offerings through the Kindle, music streaming through its new Cloud Player, vetted apps through its Android app store, and personal online storage through its Cloud Drive service.
Amazon is on Fire
It has also released a modified Android tablet in the form of the Kindle Fire, which lets users store purchased media like books, films, music and apps in the cloud, and access them on Amazon mobile devices.
Amazon is cementing its journey from an online store to an entertainment destination. It has embraced this challenge in a big way, not only providing places for content to be streamed from, but even making its own.
To do this, it has become a publisher of its own books. This could change publishing forever, with fewer intermediate steps between the author and reader. As top Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti told the Times, "The only necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader."
With the release of Amazon Music Player in America, there's speculation that it may soon do the same with music. Amazon is muscling in on the turf of Apple and Google, and it's going about it in a very competitive way.
Amazon is so keen to get you using its cloud services to buy its online content, it's even willing to subsidise the cost of its devices to get you using it. The Kindle Fire, currently only available in America, costs over $10 more to make than its $199 price tag. In much the same way that Sony and Microsoft subsidise their games consoles in the hope that they will recoup their money on games and services, Amazon has brought out a very low-cost tablet that is so integrated with the shop's selection of books, music and other content, you may never need another media provider.
Let's go to the movies
Amazon has a huge consumer base, and realised it needed to get into online content to avoid being left behind. It acquired LoveFilm in January 2011, putting it on a sound footing to take on Netflix should the American rental service make its much rumoured appearance on British shores next year.
As Simon Calver, Chief Executive of LoveFilm International said at the time, "The deal is a winner for the members who love LoveFilm because of its value, choice, convenience and innovation in home entertainment. With Amazon's unequivocal support we can significantly enhance our members' experience across Europe."
LoveFilm is also a good way of drawing people into the Amazon fold – it's already everywhere. You see LoveFilm apps built into smart TVs, on Blu-ray players and on your iPad. The iPad release was a big step for the company – it finally managed to put Amazon content on an Apple device.
Upon its release, Calver said: "LoveFilm on iPad is the latest exciting step in giving film fans total control over their viewing schedule and our commitment to expanding the ways in which members can stream movies on a range of devices."
There is still some way to go though; LoveFilm phone apps only let you organise your film and game rentals. Amazon and LoveFilm are staying tight-lipped about when a full LoveFilm player for phones will be released. Netflix is breathing down their necks having just launched in the UK, and Google is already offering an Android movie player.
However, we're sure it won't be long before we see a phone app that lets you watch Amazon's offerings anywhere with an internet connection.
Cloud music
When it comes to streaming music from the cloud, Amazon was a surprise early adopter. It beat Google and Apple by releasing Cloud Player, in March 2011. Although it's only available in the US, it's impressive, letting users back up pretty much their entire music collections to Amazon's servers. Users can then access it from computers and Android devices.
As Amazon's vice-president of music and movies Bill Carr said, "Our customers have told us they don't want to download music to their work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music to different devices. Now whether at work, home or on the go, customers can buy music from Amazon MP3, store it in the cloud and play it anywhere."
US Amazon account holders can get Cloud Player free, with 5GB of storage, but if they buy an MP3 album from Amazon that increases to 20GB. Music bought from Amazon doesn't count towards your storage limit.
So how does Amazon licence the music stored on Cloud Player? Simple – it doesn't. As Amazon's director of music Craig Pape explained: "We don't need a licence to store music. The functionality is the same as an external hard drive."
Amazon's Cloud Drive was introduced at the same time as Cloud Player. It gives US-based Amazon account holders 5GB of online space free, allowing them to back up their most important documents and photos to the cloud.
So is Amazon the future? There do seem to be gaps in its online offerings. For example, there are no email services or online apps for the creation of spreadsheets or documents, but when it comes to online content, it has most bases covered.
It may not be ready for us in the UK just yet though. Amazon is announcing no plans to extend Cloud Player and the Kindle Fire outside of the US, although some people claim to have found loopholes that let them use Amazon's Music Player on British shores.
However, until these services are fully rolled out across the world, they appear to be merely hinting as what is possible, but not quite within reach.
