Apple does not have a Mac category for their Apple Design Awards this year at their Worldwide Developers Conference. Instead, Apple is focusing on iPhone and iPad apps.

Some Mac developers think this is a signal that the Mac is not so important to Apple anymore. Mac sales for the second quarter of fiscal 2010 were up 32% year-over-year, but is that growth sustainable over the longer term?

Charlie Stross’s insightful post suggests the personal computer industry will become much more of a commoditized “profitability wasteland” because underlying prices keep dropping, and that coming wireless networking speeds will increase to the point where users can move their data to the cloud because they’ll finally have fast-enough access to it from anywhere. Apple is building a $1 billion data center in North Carolina, perhaps to be ready for this shift.

So what does the future look like then? For Apple it seems to be centered around the iPad and iPhone.

If you’re a typical consumer, in a few years you won’t buy a “computer” anymore, and you’ll probably be glad to be free of its headaches. Instead, you’ll buy an iPad and an Apple Service “subscription”. Everything else will be taken care of, at least from Apple’s point of view. All your information will be stored and (hopefully) protected by the Apple Service. Your information will be usable from several devices, as long as they’re all Apple devices. And you’ll keep buying “apps”, which scale much better as a business for Apple — Apple collects 30% of the sale at near-zero per-unit cost compared to hardware.

Consumers will take to this approach, at least for a while. In a comment on the post The iPad isn’t a computer, it’s a distribution channel, Mike Jones writes, “as long as people demand more performance than can be delivered, an integrated and closed platform is the best way to deliver. As soon as the market becomes over served, people will start demanding flexibility and customization, and then the platform (or a competitors) will open up just like a PC.” I hope so.

This shift raises lots of questions for me, such as:

What about people who value privacy and control over their data?

What does it mean for an independent Mac software vendor over the next 5-10 years?

Microsoft plans to give customers the option of running Office Web on their own servers, according to InformationWeek.

This would be a powerful way for large enterprises to get around the data ownership issues in cloud computing, especially SaaS-type offerings. But it misses out on many of the benefits of cloud computing.

A hybrid system — let’s call it “Computer as a Service” (CaaS) — could deliver the benefits of cloud computing while mitigating data ownership issues.

CaaS

With CaaS, the “service” part delivers my (virtual) corporate servers, and I pick and choose CaaS-compatible applications to put on those corporate servers. Those CaaS-compatible apps should be auto-installing, self-updating and self-managing.

With this approach I could reap many of the benefits of cloud computing, including:

• compliance best practices — experts handle security, backups, etc.
• no capital outlay
• much less support cost, fewer IT hires
• instant scalability

The service part of this approach could be simply my corporate Amazon Web Services account. A CaaS-compatible app that I buy could install itself on EC2 instances in my account, use S3 for storage and CloudFront for content delivery, etc.

Owned Cloud

I get cloud computing, but I own my data, albeit on Amazon’s servers. And I’ve eliminated SaaS-type dependency because I have the app and my AWS instances in my control, unlike a SaaS offering which may change or even disappear before I’m ready to change.