I've been furious about the Lala.com shutdown since the announcement came out yesterday. 

With the many irate Facebook and Twitter postings (most of them referencing Steve Jobs) now out of my system, I have had time to reflect more thoughtfully on why the Lala shutdown has been so difficult to accept.

Perhaps like to a lot of Lala users, I took full advantage of option to purchase unlimited web streaming rights for $0.10/track. I used it to expand my library to include exciting new genres and artists that I had discovered on my favorite alternative radio station, the Current (http://thecurrent.org), as well as music I was stumbling across on Pandora, Lala, and the like. 

The ease and affordability of using the $0.10 streaming option allowed me to grow my catalog in a way that was incredibly fun and enriching.

And now it's gone. 

I knew Lala disappearing was always a possibility (albeit a remote one), and I knew that buying rights to stream a track carried risks that buying the actual mp3 or CD doesn't. But that didn't stop me from attaching myself to the music in a way that made me feel as though it really was mine.

And therein lies the rub.

As more of our digital lives move to the cloud, more and more products can be delivered through a subscription model that provides you with access but not ownership in the traditional sense. 

As long as the company is around to provide the service, and as long as you're willing to pay for it, the distinction between access and ownership means very little. But as soon as either of those things cease to be true, the difference between access and ownership becomes glaring. 

Steve Jobs had every right to shut down Lala. Apple has no obligation to pay me back for all of those $0.10 acquisitions (though, in their one graceful move in all of this, I will get iTunes credit). And nobody is required to help me re-create my (yes, MY!) Lala catalog somewhere else. And that just sucks.

So, the wait is over and the news is out. Apple sold "over 300,000" iPads in its first day out of the gate, according to an official press release. That's more than the iPhone sold in its first weekend but far fewer than the 500,000-700,000 units some analysts had projected. (See the WSJ article here.)

Does that make it a success or a failure?

Even though it is far too early to tell, chances are you have an opinion. The iPad has been one of the most hotly debated new technology products in memory. Blogs and online articles far and wide have attracted an obscene number of comments. Online discussions have become both heated and personal, with iPad enthusiasts being dubbed naive Steve Jobs sycophants and iPad critics being labeled naysaying luddites.

The controversy doesn't tell us much about the iPad or Apple itself, as most articles and their ensuing comments are 50% speculation, 40% name-calling, and 10% fact. 

What the controversy does suggest is that we have reached a tipping in consumer technology. The internet-as-a-platform and cloud computing paradigm is taking over, and a new class of devices, many yet to be dreamed up, is emerging to deliver users content and functionality anytime, anywhere. As our data networks continue to grow larger and faster, and as strategic partnerships between data providers and device manufacturers become more sophisticated, the way in which we interact with technology will drastically change.

What the iPad controversy represents, then, is the battle for mindshare regarding what that future will ultimately look like.

I have been incredibly critical of the iPad (or perhaps, more accurately, of the iPad junkies) and personally believe the design has some important flaws. Still, I have to offer kudos to apple for putting forward the most tangible, compelling vision yet of the future of computing.