In 2001 Steve Jobs took to the stage at Macworld and unveiled Apples digital hub strategy. Your computer would be your data’s home. People keep saying how we are moving to the cloud, “it’s going to be so fluffy and great!”. We are seeing the move start to happen, thanks to faster and more reliable internet but is it the right move? Are all these overcast predictions hiding the next development in the digital hub? Your digital hub is no longer a hub, it’s more of a portable hub or as I have affectionately named it “the pub”. Kids just don’t want or have a desktop anymore. Nearly every young adult you meet today has either a laptop, netbook or an ultrabook.

When Apple envisioned this hub they saw you going home and plugging in your devices, then heading out again. Now we take our hub with us into the living room, the kitchen, meetings, lecture and even sometimes the actual pub. The idea that the cloud is going to be our new home doesn’t work for me. I would rather keep as much as I can locally for speed, ease of access and privacy. What I see happening is the cloud acting as a bridge. We no longer have to come home and plug in to sync all our data. Instead we turn on and connect anywhere anytime. This is what iCloud is doing; unlike most services it is giving us access to our hub from anywhere.

The cloud is not a new hub it is a bridge.