Irony? Apple iCloud bad for flash, good for disk?

I have to admit when I saw this headline on Tom’s Guide, I had to read on…

“Apple’s iCloud Could Dent Flash Demand”

According to the Tom’s article, “Market research firm IHS said that Apple’s iCloud offer may prompt consumers to reconsider their need for more flash memory and decrease the growth of demand over time.” That’s ironic…

Over the past year, all we hard drive companies have heard about in the analyst circles is that the adoption of flash will kill the hard drive industry, and companies like the all powerful Apple are behind it all with their MacBook Air, iPhones, iPads, etc… But then came iCloud and Apple’s purchase of 12 Petabytes of disk based storage to outfit their data center and you could hear a resounding “see – told ya so” from hard drive suppliers…well, at least from me.

Now, an actual research firm, IHS, contends that the cloud could put a dent in the demand for higher capacity flash? Okay, nothing in the near term as IHS clarifies in the article, “For now, IHS believes, the impact of the iCloud on flash memory demand will remain low. “The most likely scenario for the time being is an increase in overall demand for NAND storage – cloud or local- with users continuing to utilize the physical storage on their personal devices…But there is the clear picture that a ton of local storage in all our devices may not be so important in the future.”

So is this a bad thing for companies like Seagate?

I find it hard to believe that people will move 100% of all of their content to the cloud in the next 5, even 10 years. Content only gets richer, and the richer it gets, the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets, the more bandwidth we need to stream it from the cloud. The cloud is already trying to play catch up with content like lossless music, HD Video, 3D, etc. The rich content we currently store locally. But the time will come…maybe not in the next 5 or even 10 years, but its coming…

Any guesses on when?