Right–and guess where Palm got Palm Desktop for the Mac? … from Claris! Palm Desktop is a descendant of Claris Organizer, which 3Com bought from Claris in about 1998.

Symbian’s director has taken a series of pot shots at the iPhone, while proclaiming the Symbian mobile OS ‘three years ahead of its time’. Wonder what medicinal herbs he’s been smoking?

It’s the dream of subscription based accounting. If the customer wants to keep their data, they have to keep paying, and the money keeps rolling in. Microsoft was hoping to do this with Windows, so that they could “MONETIZE” those neanderthals who are still running Win95, Win98, WinME, NT4, Win2K, and WinXP. The also wanted to do the same with Office. Luckily, through total incompetence, they failed.

When I was phone hunting, one of my major issues was that you had to be able to locally back up the phone. If it backed up to the cloud as well, that was fine, assuming the charge was reasonable, but I had to have a local backup. I’ve got both on and off site copies of all my important stuff (offsite backup is a six hour drive, but it’s safe).

I know of a lot of businesses who could save big money by using a Google Docs/GMail combination, but who are scared by the off-site nature of the beast. What happens if their internet connection goes down?

This is the one thing that could block adoption of Google Chrome (all else being equal). I’ve heard that it will keep local copies of your docs, but we won’t know for certain until it’s actually on the market, in however many months.

I simply don’t understand why any company would want to take on the expense, let alone the risk, of maintaining a giant cloud for all their users’ data. The whole point of distributed computing is that you distribute the risk: in this case, iPhone users back up to their Mac/PC via iTunes, and they’re the ones who assume the risk of a proper backup. Overlay MobileMe if you want the added security of a cloud backup and background sync but that’s optional.

Why on earth wouldn’t Google come out with a local backup option that syncs everything to their own apps? That would be a value added service: plug your phone into your PC and your e-mail is sync’d to Google Mail, etc, etc. That would build brand identity for Google independent of what phone is running the Android OS.

And Palm is the one who had, a decade ago, a Palm desktop. Everyone at PalmCo forgot that?

Jason hits it: data is the most valuable commodity of all. My contacts, pics and e-mails aren’t valuable to you but they sure as heck are valuable to me. I’m perfectly capable of making it secure: iTunes does it nicely.

Those denouncing cloud computing need to understand a little better. It works very well, as long as you plan ahead and don’t take short cuts.

Afterall, data is the most valuable commodity of all.

With every major phone vendor having experienced serious and significant cloud service failures, more companies might begin recognizing that support for local data sync and backup through a user application like iTunes is not just a good idea, but an essential feature

Here! Here! This is especially important to business, where a data lose can mean sales lose.