Why the ‘personal cloud’ is no PC killer

“New eras” are by and large incremental variants of their predecessors, which is why proclaiming a seismic shift in IT is more often than not a fool’s game.

Enter Gartner. According to our favorite research firm, in two years, the personal computer will have been superseded by the personal cloud. Or, in its own words:

The reign of the personal computer as the sole corporate access device is coming to a close, and by 2014, the personal cloud will replace the personal computer at the center of users’ digital lives. … The personal cloud will begin a new era that will provide users with a new level of flexibility with the devices they use for daily activities, while leveraging the strengths of each device, ultimately enabling new levels of user satisfaction and productivity. However, it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users.

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It isn’t that Gartner is wrong; it’s that its conclusions are, as usual, grandiose and overstated. Fundamental shifts are most often implemented with duct tape and chewing gum. And in the case of next generation IT, this shift is already under way, thanks to a triad of devices — the smartphone, tablet, and laptop — not the cloud.

Personal cloud: A shift but not seismic

Were Gartner to walk through a typical business, it would find oodles (somewhere between “lots” and “most”) of employees whose jobs are such that smartphones, tablets, and ubiquitous access are entirely irrelevant. Don’t believe me? Consider your average call center agent. Or people who work on assembly lines (they still exist!). Accounting and payroll clerks. Retail sales staff.

Call them the 90 percenters. They’re the largely invisible (to the majority of business commentators), numerically enormous proportion of employees who grind out the day-to-day work of most companies.

This is the problem with phrases like “new era” and “fundamental rethinking.” They ignore something even more basic and fundamental than the supposedly fundamental rethinking: For the most part, all the new, glitzy stuff is a layer wrapped around the old, boring, prosaic world in which so much of what matters takes place.

Where the cloud falls short: Features and performance

Technically, Gartner is correct about the personal cloud, but only because its statement is satisfied if two employees anywhere in the world have reoriented so that their personal cloud is now the center of their digital lives. After all, Gartner said “employees,” not “all employees,” “most employees,” or even “a lot of employees.” “Employees” can mean any number greater than one.

No argument, there are employees who benefit from being able to use different devices for overlapping subsets of the information and applications they use to get their work done. They’re hardly unimportant, and Gartner is right that those IT organizations that still think supporting them with locked-down laptops is satisfactory are in for a rude awakening.

For the most part, these employees are mobile professionals — employees at all levels of the company who are expected to be able to do their work from wherever they happen to be situated. They might find the personal cloud desirable.

But having worked with many and talked with a lot more, I’d bet that if you were to give these employees a choice between a personal cloud and having all their data on a flash drive or SSD card, which they could plug into their laptop, tablet, or phone, and use it with compatible apps installed locally on each device, most would choose the flash drive or SSD card.

This, in fact, is the IT industry’s benchmark. If we want employees to prefer cloud-based services to locally installed apps and plug-in storage, the cloud-based applications had better be as feature-rich as their locally installed counterparts, and they had better load and perform just as quickly.

The same can be said for data: Working with it through hotel Wi-Fi, 3G/4G, or Gogo while inflight has to be just as quick and easy to navigate, load, and store as working with it using plug-in storage.

Devices: The true centerpiece of mobile Smartphones and tablets have demonstrated just how much people prefer locally installed apps to their browser-delivered alternatives. Services such as Dropbox are popular because they synchronize data with the cloud. If they delivered it through the cloud, they’d be dismal failures.

Which is what makes Gartner’s “personal cloud” forecast so irritatingly wrong — the centerpiece of mobile employees’ digital lives won’t be the cloud at all. It will be a triad of devices: smartphones, tablets, and laptops. The cloud will probably be an important adjunct to this triad. But for Gartner’s forecast to make any sense at all, we’ll have to consider smartphones, tablets, and laptops part of the cloud.

It brings us back to a point I made a few years ago: Gartner has redefined “cloud.” In GartnerSpeak, it now means “everything.”

This story, “Why the ‘personal cloud’ is no PC killer,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’ Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.