"Horrendous": Steve Wozniak on the cloud

According to Agence France-Presse, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has heavily criticised the shift to cloud-based computing. Speaking in a post-event dialogue with Mike Daisey and the audience after a performance of Daisey's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Wozniak was said to be outspoken about the move from storing data locally to uploading content to remote servers.

"I really worry about everything going to the cloud," he said. "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years." Some of Wozniak's main concerns appeared to mirror those of Steve Jobs when dealing with the music industry and the concept of media ownership: "With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away [through legalistic terms of service]. I want to feel that I own things. A lot of people feel, 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it."

Wozniak's comments come as Apple is pinning much of its future on iCloud, its online service that ties together iOS devices and Macs, enabling personal data, user-created documents and store-bought media to be easily synchronised. This isn't the first time Wozniak has been at odds with the company he co-founded, however – he claimed Siri was far better before Apple purchased it in 2010 (BGR) and he was recently critical of Apple's closed nature (iTnews), suggesting in part that was down to Steve Jobs never having written programs.