> I see no practical use and only danger. Outages,
> ownership, authority snooping, seizures, hacking,
> etc, etc.
Yep, selection bias. Cloud is not used for anything else, just snooping and hacking.
I see a practical use: I dont' care what device I am on, I always have my contacts in sync, I can now see the same tabs open, I can access my presentation which I started yesterday on MBP on my iPhone.
> Nothing vital to me would ever sit in or on a cloud.
Well my kidneys are not on the cloud. Neither my lungs. My contacts? Not vital at all. My presentations? Not vital at all. My music? Not vital at all. But damn is this convenient to have that stuff up there.
> I've seen too much go wrong to ever trust them.
Then don't.
> Overall, I just don't understand why people who have decent, cheap local
> storage and back up ability already,
Because when I figure in my time needed to configure and maintain this decent, cheap and local storage it is not that cheap anymore. And local does not really cut it.
> while retaining complete control, would suddenly hand all their vital data
> over to somewhere where you lose all control.
Maybe some are not control freaks? And maybe some just have some data what is not "vital", but can be kept in the cloud? Like music collection?
I think that the severe anti-cloud reaction comes from the extreme pro-cloud cheering that we see on HN. While you may have a level headed approach, just look at all of the 'post pc era' people that want all computers to be ipads and all data to reside in the cloud... Ignoring the fact that this opens up all of your data to warrantless searches by law enforcement, or remote wipes by hackers.
FWIW, as a confirmed cloud sceptic, I think it's about a lot more than just warrantless searches and accidental remote wipes. While these are legitimate concerns, I think we'd probably all agree that they are unlikely to adversely affect most cloud-hosted customers.
The more serious concerns, to me, are about cost/benefit, availability, inconsistency, and plain old quality.
On cost/benefit, a lot of the cloud hype seems to assume that outsourcing functionality and data storage will lead to cost savings, yet I have seen little evidence to support this case in reality. Certainly if you look at the raw numbers, using things like AWS or GAE are far more expensive per unit of processing power/storage/bandwidth than any number of traditional local or dedicated hosting options, unless you really do have computing demands that go up and down like a yo-yo over very short time intervals, which hardly anyone actually does. So then we're down to efficiency savings in operations/sysadmin work and redundancy in the event of hardware failures, and I struggle to see how multiplying the basic costs several times over can possibly be offset by those overheads, even if you assume (obviously incorrectly) that there is no overhead at all to configuring and maintaining cloud-based systems. (Edit: In case my point here wasn't clear before, this doesn't just affect those providing cloud services, it also implies a certain minimum level of mark-up for all these SaaS businesses that are built on these cloud platforms who want consumers and businesses to use their web-based software rather than running local applications.)
Availability is easy: If your Internet connection drops, you are a sailboat without wind. And while some parts of the world are enjoying near 100% reliable 100Mbps broadband, most parts of the world aren't enjoying anything like that reliability or those speeds.
Inconsistency is the Achilles heel of many consumer cloud apps, IMHO: I don't think the general population are going to be happy with endless minor (or occasionally not so minor) UI revisions that they can't control. Take a look at what happens every time Facebook do a major update, or the feedback about browsers that keep moving everything around as they auto-update, or try using Google Docs at work for more than a few days and watch your colleagues start pulling their hair out. The easy distribution and updating of web apps is great in some ways, but it does have a downside, and I'm noticing a marked increase in user frustration as more and more things are forever moving around.
Finally, again looking at cloud-hosted web apps from a user's point of view, the simple fact is that for a lot of software, what you get with a cloud app just isn't up to the same standards as what you get with traditional native apps. Google Docs (Drive, whatever) vs. MS Office? They're not even competing for the same space, because the Google stuff lacks huge amounts of elementary functionality, never mind all the automation/integration/customisation stuff.
In short, it's not just that some people want all computers to be iPads and all data to reside in the cloud, it's that they want all software to be written for five-year-olds and some of us have real work to do.
Speaking of music collection - for the past week I'm trying to download two albums that I bought, off of Amazon's Cloud Player. Apparently, their own MP3 Downloaded is horribly broken on Windows 7 (given that screenshots on their support page show Windows XP in 2012, I'm not that surprised). Makes me wonder if I ever want to keep anything up there, if I can't get it out.
Woz is right on the money - anything we put in the cloud make us be on the mercy of provider's business plan, reliability and plain quality of QA processes.
I couldn't care any less if my Facebook posts or Twitter updates were wiped off the face of the earth.
I would care if my email archives, photographs, music collection, etc., were destroyed, but with varying degrees of concern. For example, I'll often buy individual music tracks from iTunes, but if I know I want a whole album, I buy a physical CD. I might only use the CD once to rip it to my computer, but I have an automatic backup that, so far, seems pretty robust, as I still have working CDs that I bought in the mid-1990's... which is more than I can say for my email archives!
Re CDs - that's precisely why I'm trying to download albums that I bought from Amazon. I feel much safer when I have access to my media locally, on my terms, with software I choose.
My anecdote: I bought two albums as one-click purchases from Amazon and downloaded them to my phone before they realized my credit card info was no longer valid. I was too scared not to buy them again!
I see a practical use: I dont' care what device I am on, I always have my contacts in sync, I can now see the same tabs open, I can access my presentation which I started yesterday on MBP on my iPhone.
But there is no reason we couldn't do that with a basic home or small office network, adding basic VPN functionality to allow remote access if necessary. It's not particularly difficult to set these things up today for anyone who can set up a broadband router and home wireless network. If they were the must-have technologies being promoted instead of the cloud then it would get even easier, as the people making the equipment built more user-friendly interfaces that didn't need much in the way of technical skills at all, and as ready-made server software to co-ordinate your mail or calendar or music collection or whatever became as simple as a one-click download.
My contacts? Not vital at all. My presentations? Not vital at all. My music? Not vital at all.
Somehow I suspect you'd disagree if all your contacts started getting phishing e-mails that looked like they came from you, or if you blew a million-dollar business deal because your presentation wasn't available when you visited a prospective client, or if you had thousands of dollars' worth of music that you'd spent real money on and it disappeared overnight because the service provider closed down the system or you didn't realise you couldn't transfer something between accounts or you sync'd the wrong thing the wrong way. Things like these can and do happen, but I think there's a perception of "It'll never happen to me".
Because when I figure in my time needed to configure and maintain this decent, cheap and local storage it is not that cheap anymore.
I guess you're looking at this from a personal point of view. I'm not sure it's really true even then, but I acknowledge that setting up and maintaining IT systems today does require technical skills that most home users don't have, and if your new tablet or laptop or smartphone ships with the vendor's pet cloud services already integrated then of course that's an easier user experience since it just works (as long as you're happy to use those services and don't want any others).
I don't really buy that argument at all for businesses, though. Usually there are all kinds of gotchas if you're doing serious work in the cloud. Just look at the string of pathetic excuses and weasel words every time Amazon's services go down about how you should have used redundant something-or-other and different availability-wotsits, and then look at how many businesses either hadn't understood this or hadn't wanted to spend the extra money or simply hadn't done it yet and wound up offline as a result. I defy anyone to claim that the time and money to configure cloud services to be reliable per all these recommendations is harder than setting up equivalent equipment on-site or with dedicated hosting and a decent off-site backup system, assuming that you have someone who knows what they are doing in each case to do the work.
Well said. Also there is a prevailing myth that the average user cannot secure his/her data and often one hear statements that what if your laptop goes under truck? So we can protect your data better than you do. I honestly say this notion is an insult to an average end user intelligence. The fact is if you can change the light bulbs you can run a personal server. If you find it difficult put the data in an flash disk and connect to your key chain. That will be much safer than cloud services.
Powerful vested interests working to amplify this myth because in the end you get a indentured customer base that you can fleece for years.
Fundamentally, there is no need for a lot of these ideas to be complicated. There is no reason we couldn't have home server/VPN software that was almost entirely plug-and-play for non-technical consumers, and which was still built on robust and well-understood technologies so the geeks could easily support it.
I believe the main reason we don't have that already is that the cloud computing PR machine stole the developer mindshare first. The kind of people who might have started companies to cater to the market I described above have instead started companies based on cloud technologies.
But there is no technical reason I shouldn't be able to run a simple installer on any home computer that sets up, say, a simple mail store and an IMAP server so all my devices can connect to it. There is no reason we couldn't have GUIs no more complicated than today's e-mail or calendar or IM software to configure fetching your mail or planning events and sharing invitations with friends/colleagues. There's no reason, aside from obnoxious DRM schemes perhaps, that we couldn't have a one-click-installed home media server that can act as a hub for your music/video/streaming pay-per-view/whatever content.
The technology to do all of these things is basically already there, it's just too often the case that it only runs on one OS, or requires messing around with a command line and text configuration files to set it up, or requires figuring out an absurd amount of technical details from 57,249 half-complete README files and three-year-old HOWTOs.
I'm actually a little surprised that Microsoft hasn't fought back against the on-line/cloud push, where it has been utterly destroyed by the likes of Google and shows no signs of resurrecting itself any time soon, with a comprehensive bring-your-own-cloud campaign that emphasized things like security, flexibility and reliability where the cloud hasn't exactly lived up to its own hype. They already had the required dominance on the desktop and in the business software market, and I can't help thinking that if they had tried to out-Blackberry a severely weakened RIM by offering a solid business product range instead of launching one underwhelming consumer phone after another, the mobile device market would look very different today. And once MS had the brand and credibility at business level, it would have the experience to attack consumer space from a position of strength, and the warchest needed to acquire a few key on-line/mobile players to help that move. But what do I know? I'm sure Windows 8 and the Surface (whatever that brand means this week) will be much more successful. ;-)
If you can figure out facebook timeline, twitter hash tags and dropbox sync you can figure out personal server too. If there is a will there is a way. All you need is awareness.
If you find running a personal server too difficult try tonido or any of those plug computers. You don't need to take my word. Just try and see. You will be pleasantly surprised.
