Follow Me Across Devices

Apple has become the world's largest technology company, crowning the phenomenal decade of growth. Overtaking Google and Microsoft, firing on all cylinders fueled by extra hot (I mean cool...) products and even more expectations. I bet nobody predicted such outcome ten years ago, when the first iPod (5GB spindle, firewire) was hitting the store shelves. The iPhone has been even bigger game changer, essentially transforming the industry. Today every phone is a smartphone, with the top ones trying to challenge the king. Mobile Internet is a service we all know, understand and expect. George Gilder's vision of a teleputer is reality today. So the question now is about tomorrow, and few years from now. Will Apple stay at the top or will it be conquered?

We live in an ever accelerating world, so any long term predictions are inaccurate by default. Today, instead of predicting, I will focus on what I want, and wait for to happen. If my wishes and needs are in parallel with other's wishes and needs, chances are the technology and market will develop to answer the needs and fulfill the wishes.

The computers I use are always a compromise. A compromise between comfort and size / weight. Between processing power and battery life. And there is no way to have a single machine, that is ideal for every task. That is why we usually have more than one computer. One with a big screen and big keyboard and comfortable mouse sitting on the desk at home or at work. The second - portable one. It is either a laptop that is too heavy, or a netbook that has too small screen and keyboard. Then some of us have iPads / Kindles and similar tablets. And finally smartphones. What all these computers have in common now is the applications and content we use and share among them. We take pictures with smartphones, want them to display on iPads. We write documents on desktops and want to continue reviewing them on the road. We book hotel rooms and air tickets on our laptops and want to have them on our smartphones. Today even TV is entangled in these scenarios (and will be more... you have probably already seen the Google TV...). Why not starting an episode in the living room and continue while riding a bus?

So the idea is to have the context following us when we switch from one device to another. By context I mean the state of everything we do with computers. The open tabs in Web browser. Position of those tabs. Browsing history. Saved passwords and cookies. Spellcheckers with customized dictionaries and rules. Multimedia with position markers - where we paused reading / watching / listening. Address books. Points of interest geotagged on maps. And even trash cans / recycle bins.

First, to get there, we have to virtualize the context. We have to move all our activities to a single master machine, somewhere in the cloud. A machine that is as personal as my email account, and will keep the entire context of mine. Installed applications. Opened documents. Saved passwords. Customized spellcheckers. Favorites. Plus the content we own - music, photos, and so on. I do not care where exactly this machine is physically located. I just want to be sure it is secure, always accessible, and has enough capacity to hold everything I want.

Once it is there, all my computers will be just screens and keyboards attached to this master computer. I can start any task on one screen / keyboard and continue on another, exactly from the point I left. Even the simplest tasks of putting a shopping list on a desktop computer, and then grabbing my cellphone, and go to the shopping mall, and follow the list. Without any synchronization task in between.

What is more... switching to a new device, a task we hate today, will not require any effort. Unbox, connect to the Internet, log on to your master computer and you are done. No extra syncing, no application installation / reinstallation. Everything as before, only in a new form factor. Just imagine how big an opportunity this is for the hardware vendors! We would be changing devices much more often...

Now to put all those visions in a context. I have spent a lot of time with both Apple and Google products. iPhones and Androids. iWork and Google Docs. And I can tell you. Apple has the edge in hardware design and appeal. But Google is so far ahead fulfilling the vision of virtualized personal context following the user to any device, that the gap, at the moment, widens and seems almost impossible to close.

I remember working on a single text document simultaneously with a friend of mine two years ago. Two cursors, one at the desk using a PC, the other on a netbook in a train. And it is not a closed ecosystem. Using Google, I write my shopping list now in a FireFox window, and I pick my BlackBerry, where the document is updated. No syncing. Just opening a link. I did my conference presentation in Microsoft Office 2007 PowerPoint, uploaded it to Google Docs, where I continued editing it, and I can run the slideshow on my Nexus / Android smartphone now.


Comparing this to the experience of moving the same presentation from Windows via iTunes to the iPad - the latter was a nightmare. I had to connect the iPad to the laptop with a cable (kind of reminds me the null-modem based Laplink file transfers of the early 1990's). Beforehand I had to purchase the iPad Pages application (even though I already had one PowerPoint license for making slides). Then it finally showed on the iPad, but with evident conversion errors. Much more effective way was to play the same presentation on the iPad using just the Safari browser connected to the Google Docs service. The presentation renders way better than using iPad's Pages. Unfortunately does not output via the VGA connector, which seems to be reserved for the selected native iPad applications only.

So yes, I will keep on using Apple's hardware. The iPod Nano, I like to play my MP3s with. The iPad is also really nice and comfortable in many circumstances. And I will keep on using many other devices - my laptop, my Kindle reader, my smartphone. But I will not spend money on applications tied to any particular platform. So good bye, Apple AppStore. And I will not spend money on content playable on a single closed platform either. Thank you iBooks, and welcome Amazon Kindle. Any Kindle book I buy from Amazon, I can read on my laptop, my smartphone, my Kindle reader, and the iPad too, with the context synchronized (it opens on a page I left, when switching devices). And I will not be spending time creating content on applications tied to any particular platform. Microsoft Office has been good as a starting point (I have been using it for almost twenty years now....), but I can see Google Docs can already handle presentations better than I expected, and they are instantly available on any device I access the Web with.

It is time to start moving the personal context to the cloud, freeing it from the physical bounds of local hardware. Google seems to be the right starting point, with additional services like Kindle and Pandora. And by the way this is the old idea of Java clients, promoted in the late 1990's by a company named Sun (that does not exist anymore). Ten years ago it was too early. Connectivity was just not there. But now it is. Apps and null modem cables are dead. Long live the Web and wireless.

PS. I suppose some readers hear the Chrome OS ringing behind the story. I would not write off the other names... Microsoft has something brewing. And of course we have HP with the recently acquired WebOS (although Matias Duarte joins the Android team...).