You have the ultimate device with the ultimate software. There’s just one thing missing: something to which you’ll connect once you get to that great wide information superhighway. We need services.
On a base level, a service is pretty much anything that feeds content to an application. That can be as simple as a Google log-in on a third party site, or as complex as a continuous client that’s kept in sync across multiple devices in real time.
Where hardware makes things go and software makes things happen, by and large today the services are becoming the ‘things’ that need to go and happen. Services pipe our data to and from a server somewhere, something we’re calling the cloud, as if bytes are raining down in a digital rain shower.
But does it have to be this way? Are these fancy smartphones and tablets really just portals to content that’s being fetched from a server farm? Are there core services that every platform needs to support? And is there a place in our lives for the old USB sync cable?
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