Dell has been getting more and more of a presence in the mobile market, they still make some killer desktops, and plenty of good laptops too but they’ve recently started branching out into mobile hardware like cell phones and the like. In fact, Dell is projecting that 2011 will be the first year in which they sell more tablets and smartphones than they do PCs.
So it does make quite a bit of sense to see them lay some substantial cash into cloud computing, which gives them an edge with mobile hardware as it allows users to store things like songs and videos in an environment accessible from their phones yet not dependent on chips and the like in mobile devices. Though it does essentially trade storage for bandwidth, and we all know that bandwidth is in pretty short supply, And this isn’t a bad idea, at least under certain conditions. As long as you’ve got sufficiently fat pipes to access all your data on someone else’s server whenever you want it, But again, the full value of the cloud will not likely be found until we get internet access up to snuff. We’re getting there, sure enough, but it’ll be a while, so don’t look for the cloud to completely take over for some time.