Online collaboration: state of the art

Who didn’t create a draft email back in the day, attached a file, just to open the draft at some other location for access to that file?

 

Nowadays the cloud is ubiquitous. It plays a vital role in our every-day lives, whether it be in our private engagements, or professional. Need to get a big file to a collaborator in Japan? No big deal. Clouds had a significant impact on almost any of our lives’ aspects, and not without reason. It’s truly powered a technological marvel which even in the 90s was wild to imagine.

 

Business-wise there’s another significant benefit to the cloud paradigm, and that’s in the business model. You’ve got the end-user’s value centralized within infrastructure you control, so you as a cloud vendor can require fees for access and use.

 

Because of the simplicity of such centralization, both to the user and to the vendor, the capabilities of the cloud grew: It started as a simple data synchronization medium; but simple Internet pages became full-fledged applications; previously only possible as desktop software. Or cloud computing: Access to high-performance computing infrastructure for a fee. Streaming services: Take a subscription for a series exclusively available on said platform. Thus, the cloud brought about a revolution in browser performance and web technologies too.

 

Moreover, the cumbersome process of shipping multi-OS desktop software became a problem concentrated solely with the browser vendors; this was more efficient for everybody: “If you create a good multi-platform browser, we create a good application which runs on your browser.” It’s a win-win, no software piracy troubles, and fine-grained control and understanding over users’ use of the application.