Evil Clouds
Posted on September 29, 2008
So I have written about the coming out of a great cloud computing suite, Zoho, and then again about GE choosing Zoho for 400,000 desktops.
I have lauded the merits of such tools being available on the Internet and for free at a basic level, and how they measure very favorably to the likes of Microsoft Office.
Now up and come some of the venerable veterans of the Internet such as Richard Stallman (founder of GNU), and Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle) to throw (not cold water) but ice on the idea of cloud computing.
Stallman says “it’s stupidity…it’s worse than stupidity, it’s marketing hype.” Ellison opines that cloud computing announcements are “complete gibberish”.
The growing number of users who are storing info on far-away servers and accessing it on the Internet instead of their own machines is certainly what has caused the immense popularity of Web 2.0 apps. People by the bazillions now upload personal data such as emails, pictures, and more recently, even their work documents, to sites owned by companies such as Google and Zoho.
These gentlemen, while certainly privacy oriented, seem to more dislike the idea of cloud computing for another reason, the “marketing hype” as Stallman called it. They seem to feel that it all has the potential to become a trap to eventually lock the user in by turning free to paid and all but holding the user’s data hostage.
One thing I guess I have never mentioned, possibly I took it for granted, is that if you are going to cloud compute, be sure the company you use allows you to export or download all your documents, etc. so you always have a local copy.
I would have greater concern of a company suddenly disappearing than I would of them becoming fee-based. If you keep a local copy of everything you do, you can’t get hurt too bad.
If you are not going to spend the bucks for MS Office (and that’s one reason you are cloud computing anyway, I imagine), then keep a local copy of OpenOffice to be able to work on your files while deciding where to move your business if your cloud goes away.
» Filed Under Cloud Computing, Google Apps, Zoho
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