Client vs. Server

I’ve been thinking and talking about this age-old technology issue lately.

Last week, Jeff Jarvis wrote his post on A Place For My Stuff. I emailed Jeff the following:

The big problem with a web-based place for my stuff is that I can’t get to it on an airplane, many hotel rooms, etc.

I am in San Diego right now paying $0.50/minute for high speed access in the business office in the basement of a hotel. Yuk!

Until we truly have IP everywhere, the web-based place for my stuff has some problems.

Instead of sending Jeff a private email, Ed Sim did what bloggers are supposed to do and blogged Jeff’s post, not once, but twice.

Then I was meeting with my friend Rob Reid yesterday. Rob started Listen.com which developed the Rhapsody music service. Rob’s at Real now and continues to work on making Rhapsody a great service. I told Rob that I’ve become addicted to Rhapsody for finding music and trying things out. But eventually, I want to buy music and “own” it; store it on my laptop, music server, iPod, and burn it. Rhapsody stinks at that and Rob knows it as well as anyone. iTunes does that brilliantly. So Rhapsody is the server in the sky and iTunes is the best client for music i’ve seen. For now, I still need to use both.

Last night, I was hanging out with my brothers and a couple friends. We got talking about the powerbook in my kitchen that has a screensaver on it that rotates through the entire iPhoto library. It turns the powerbook into a picture frame. And people can’t keep their eyes off of it.

One of my friends said that his wife prefers to keep their photos on the web. That’s cool and I do that too. But its not so easy to turn your powerbook into a screen saver that way.

My point in this rambling post is that the client has a lot to offer that the server just can’t replicate right now. In time, it may. But not anytime soon in my book.