Sitting in Santa Clara, living the iTunes Match dream, I get it. Streaming media, all devices can see all content, lets live in the "Cloud", etc, etc. I get it. But what Apple and Google seem to forget, ironically, is that most of the world isn't hyper-connected. Networks do go offline, and mobile networks aren't as reliable or as cheap as you would think everywhere in the world.
I say this is ironic, because while I'm sitting behind a pretty decent connection (50Mbps cable) here in the US, most of the engineers who built these products come from countries with the same, or worse, data connectivity problems that we have in South Africa, or with prohibitive costs.
There must be a harder, but more elegant, solution to this problem. Solving the worlds connectivity problems is going to take decades, and in spite of the great effort of initiatives like the Alliance for Affordable Internet, often times telco gear is literally ripped from the ground faster than its laid.
Stop pretending connectivity is ubiquitous and cheap, smart Silicon Valley people. Try harder!
