Apple's new MobileMe service has had a tough reception. Not entirely unsurprising. After all, when you are heralding the second coming of the 'Jesus Phone', its inevitable that expectations might be running unfairly high.

Yet when the furor over the buggy release dies down, I think people will realise that in some ways MobileMe is more significant than the new iPhone itself. Here's why - cloud storage is the future. We have been building to this point for a while. The real impact of Web2.0 was not new interface designs or crazy social networking site valuations - but the idea that websites should be platforms, and that your data should live on the web not on your PC. Contacts, photos, articles, comments, videos - when data lives in the cloud it is not only accessible from wherever you are, it is able to interact with other bits of data as well.

New services like MobileMe will do for your data what Facebook did with your contact book. It will become a bridge between your devices and the rest of the world. Ray Ozzie at Microsoft had planned a similar strategy with Mesh, but like any release of Windows - that too seems to have been lost in translation. Of course, eventually I believe it won't just be your own data that will live in the cloud - the world's entertainment and media content will also migrate from your devices and be available streaming on demand.

However for any of this to be remotely useful, one big thing has to change - cheap, global, data roaming. There is no point having all the content in the world at your fingertips when you are getting done over a barrel on international data roaming charges. If Bill Gates in the eighties dreamed of a computer on every desktop, I'd like to imagine a world with a fixed price, all you can eat, global mobile broadband data contract.

Now that will be the start of the real revolution.