Small Fish, Big Pond

…Well at least not it’s potential for ripping us off in usage fees. Not every cloud has a silver lining

Cory talks a lot about how payment for a cloud based computing model will work for businesses, I have to admit I kind of overlook this part and skipped directly to the security issues of letting a third party control your vital information, although Cory hits on that as well:

But for the average punter, cloud computing is – to say the least – oversold. Network access remains slower, more expensive, and less reliable than hard drives and CPUs. Your access to the net grows more and more fraught each day, as entertainment companies, spyware creeps, botnet crooks, snooping coppers and shameless bosses arrogate to themselves the right to spy on, tamper with or terminate your access to the net.

It’s pretty similar to some of the posts I’ve made before. Basically why give all your info to a third party company and access it through a potentially unsecure, non-working bottleneck over the internet rather than just handle everything in house on your own equipment?

Jon Stokes’ rebuttal at Ars Technica makes some good points but seems to counter different issues; and does a better job pointing out the problem of the term “Cloud Computing” meaning different things to different people. My ides of the cloud is similar to Doctrow’s where I think Stokes is describing Web 2.0 more than anything else. A lot of the programs he claims are proof of benefits in the cloud are just Web 2.0 programs that can be run in the cloud or in house, not really proving a benefit one way or another.

However Jon’s description of Evernote is a cloud based app but it’s a service that most companies are looking at providing for free. The basic idea is syncing your PIM data to an online source to allow you to sync the data between phones, mobile devices, and home computers over the net. I think apple does this now for $100 a year and Microsoft, Google and others have options for doing for free (albeit it a more kludge like manner). But even remote PIM synchronization can be done in-house through MS Exchange, so we’re not really breaking new ground there either; just giving the public Exchange features without having to run their own Exchange server.

Jon Stokes makes a point to say that cloud computing is going to mean different things to small time customers like me and you, and big giant businesses that can pay for expensive cloud server rentals. While I agree that they’re different I think Jon has it backwards. Big companies have the resources to handle their own datacenters in house and thus cloud computing is less desirable to them. But the ability of cloud services give us public users the ability to use some fancy programs that previously only big companies had the ability to deploy; the only price is the increased exposure to the problems of the net and risks to privacy.