Saturday, September 5, 2009

Arguments against Cloud Computing

Google have been pushing Cloud Computing it for a while but I shrugged off their initial enthusiasm because when all you have is a website then everything looks like a web application. Then Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon but I figure they'll jump on any new idea just in case it spawns a serious competitor and they miss the chance to kill the opposition before it grows bigger than they are. Now IBM has joined the party by selling LotusLive so it seems that all Three Emperors have New Clothes made from the same cloth. On my grumpy days all of this Cloud Computing stuff just seems to be just a repackaging of Domino Hosting from the 1990's - ie a useful product but not the answer to everything.

So it's reassuring for me to read this post from Cory Doctorow who's more cynical than I am about the whole idea.
...the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

There are some interesting comments following his blog post but I did notice that a significant number of the pro-Cloud comments were made by people who were selling Cloud-related services.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm still waiting for the first major data breach in the cloud. You know it's just a matter of time until it happens. When virtually all of your intellectual property gets hacked the 'savings' offered by the cloud will look pretty minor.