You own nothing.
That’s the bottom line. Is that really a good thing? If you listen to a recent talking heads from the tech community, we don’t need to really own anything. One writer for Wired.com said “ownership is for suckers.”
Apple seems to agree with the news of their upcoming OX 10.7 (codenamed Lion) possibly only shipping on 1-time-use-only flash drives. And, with the success of their App store for the iPad and iPhone, they are now creating an App store for your home computer. The catch? You’ll never actually get to own any software that you ever buy.
The “cloud” world is already there. Apple is just joining Google, Dropbox, Carbonite, Open Docs, Mozy and a host of other companies who are providing “services” for things we used to buy.
Perhaps it is in the gaming world that we’ve seen this move fastest. You should have heard of the service called “Steam” that provides access to 100s of games. Blizzard Entertainment is one of the strongest companies in the industry and their latest two major games (Starcraft II and the upcoming Diablo III) are both limited to playing while connected to the Internet.
Now the supporters of this are going to point to a lot of issues from environmental friendliness to the “legal” reality that software is only a license that you agree to (that’s the little “click here to accept” button that everything seems to have these days). They may be right on some points, but the reality is that once upon a time, when I bought something like a book or an album or a piece of art, I actually took it home with me and it belonged to me.
Why does this matter? Ask John Locke from England, circa 1680s. It was Locke who first said put forth the key thought that humans needed to be protected in their life, their ability to have liberty and to have protection of their property—anything that they purchased or created with their own hands. He wrote, “Men therefore in society having property, they have such a right to the goods, which by the law of the community are theirs, that no body hath a right to take their substance or any part of it from them, without their own consent: without this they have no property at all; for I have truly no property in that, which another can by right take from me, when he pleases, against my consent.”
Our system of government and life was then constructed on this view that my personal property, something that I have bought or created with my own effort, was mine and protected by government. Or from a business. Of course, many will argue that the idea of the “license” defends the business from giving away their intellectual property. This debate has long reigned and previously was settled through the idea of copyright. The problem with that today is related to “piracy” where, if something was digital, it was easy for some people to steal the product.
Many claim that these companies mean no harm to any legitimate person, but the evidence is already trickling in that the game is fully tilted against consumers. Blizzard has already banned someone who, in their minds, was “cheating” while playing his own game on his own computer against. . .no one. This person was merely playing their game, using various programs to help them in the process—so the person was harming no one and accomplishing nothing against any other human—thus Blizzard who controls the game (remember, you can’t play without being online) shut him out of his own game. And, of course, did not offer to send him his money back.
What happens when your Goggle docs just disappear? Don’t think Google can control what you do or do not see? Ask the folks in China. Or your backups held by companies like Mozy or Carbonite—when those disappear, how exactly do you plan to get that information back? The same can be said, of course, for your own hard drives that you may back up with in your home, but at least, at that point, you can hold the hard drive in your hands and take it somewhere to hopefully extract your info.
The reality is that we are indeed into a strange new world where the old rules are vanishing. The author of the Wired article waxes eloquently about how great it is to not own anything. Locke, and Jefferson after him 100 years later, would be stunned to see how quickly we have given up our rights.