Fed up with
The Cloud already? Can't blame you. But same as
IP and lawyers, it's here to stay whether we like it or not. Some people love it, some people hate it, I'm in the middle.
The concept is obviously really nice, having all your files in a place where you don't have to worry about backups, redundancy, maintenance.... sounds like heaven. But it isn't. Currently
it's a trap, Stallman
dixit. Just after he said so there were
people all over the place jumping on him.
Problem with Stallman is that he's not the very finest orator ever. But if you can ignore the
how, then you get to the
what and find gems such as this one:
Somebody is saying that the cloud is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true
Damn right. And he's also right about the biggest deal regarding The Cloud:
One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control
When we use Flickr, YouTube, GMail, Amazon S3, Google App Engine, or any other service like that, we are trading privacy for comfort. But not only that. Putting data on the cloud is very easy.
Getting it out not so much.
So, what we do? We obviously want the good part (nice services that someone else maintains) but we don't want the bad part (losing privacy and freedom to move). If we step back a little bit we can quickly realize that we've been using "cloud computing" for quite a while already anyway, that's what ISPs are. Someone that takes care of setting up a good infrastructure, installing the servers, Apache, a Linux distro, configuring everything.... It sounds like "cloud computing" to me. There's a big, big difference, though. I can very easily move from one ISP to another. Heck, I can even pay for a fixed IP and install a server on my house and (more or less) do the job myself. I can install Linux, Apache, PHP, mySQL and get on with my life. That's freedom.
The problem is, there's no easy escape from Google App Engine. Or from Blogger. Or Flickr. Or YouTube... Sure you can back up some of your data, but there's no standard.
That is the problem.
Let alone privacy and data stealing. Check out
this comment on /.:
Small business people want to focus on their businesses, not on setting up and maintaining IT. They don't service their own cars & delivery vans, so why should they run their own inhouse IT?
Because if their auto mechanic goes bankrupt/closes they can always find another one to take their cars to. If their IT service goes bankrupt/closes, you can find another provider, but the data you had is gone.
It is in only the rare case that your car is in the shop when the mechanic goes bankrupt that you have any chance of losing your car; your data is always in the IT shop.
Also, there is little of proprietary interest in your automobile. "Oh, look, they drove 3000 miles since the last oil change." Doesn't mean much. There is a LOT of proprietary interest in your customer data, and stealing it would be trivial. You wouldn't even know it was gone, because technically it wouldn't be. It would just be that your competitor has a copy of all your data, too.
Is not that you have to trust Google with your data. You have to trust Google
employees too. Scary.
And to wrap up, the myth of "small company is not going to do better than big, dedicated company". Might be true, but guess what?
Google goes down too. And that's not the biggest problem. The big one is that
you have no one to complain to, not even if you pay. Your problems are just a ticket between hundreds of thousands of complains. However, when your super-nice 2.0 web-app fails mercilessly or when your boss cannot access for hours that very important Excel spreadsheet that it's in the cloud
**you** my friend are in big trouble.
Careful with the cloud.