In making the move, Apple signaled its view that the future of laptops would be lightweight machines that increasingly rely on cloud services provided through remote servers. It comes as the company gears up to push its iCloud service and vision of a highly synchronized world in which music and other material can be accessed across a number of highly mobile devices.
“It’s about the mobile Internet and cloud computing,” Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said. “It’s just getting started.” LATIMES

The initiative is part of the cloud computing alliance between Telstra Enterprise and Government and Accenture, signed in April 2010 but announced only in October that year. It also fits within Telstra’s announcement earlier this year of plans to invest $800m in cloud computing in the next five years.
Telstra CTO, Hugh Bradlow, said: “One of the things we have been looking at as part of our $880m investment in cloud is how we can deliver a more complete set of cloud services with new innovations and the sort of capabilities …

Dell Inc. said Monday that it will team with VMware to offer cloud computing services based on VMware’s technology.
The alliance with VMware follows the unveiling this spring of Dell’s cloud strategy, which aims to create a global network of data centers that will offer cloud computing services to a wide range of customers around the world.
Cloud computing enables companies to locate part or all of their business software and data in flexible computing networks in remote data systems. The technology is d esigned to deliver more cost efficiency and flexibility …