Small Fish, Big Pond

I agree with Larry Ellison about the misuse of “Cloud Computing” as a buzzword (my older posts here and here).

99% of what people mention as “Cloud Computing” is nothing more than Web 2.0, which is not anything more than crunching normal data and putting it online in a simple website.

Just about anything people claim is “cloud” based already existed on the web long before this buzzword came up. Spotify “Puts music in the cloud”, never mind that they do the same thing that last.fm has done for 6 years, never mind that all last.fm does is stream music to you which RealPlayer has done since the late 90’s, never mind that Realplayer is just using the UDP portion of the TCP protocol that has been around since the 70’s.

So what we have is files stored on remote servers that are sent to a user?
What a novel idea! What do you think webpages are?

Even Web 2.0 was a better buzzword because at least then companies were taking massive user input, crunching the data on their servers and feeding it back to the users, it was a process of making better use of the web, but even then it wasn’t a magic new technology.

The other use of “Cloud Computing” as a term is really just describing “Server Virtualization” at a datacenter, something that has been done for quite a while now. Instead of buying your own server, and renting out rack space at a datacenter, the data center is renting virtual server out to you with virtual storage and virtual processing for you to put your code on. The code and the service you provide to your customers is the same as it’s always been. The only difference is that you don’t own the equipment the code sits on anymore.

It’s like switching from 5×8 workdays to 4×10 workdays. Your company may get some efficiency benefit but it doesn’t change the fact that people working are still working the same job they did before.

Reading through the comments on TechCrunch I realized that most people still don’t know what “Cloud Computing” is. Simply put it’s just crunching some data and putting it online for users to look at (or what people were calling Web2.0 a few years ago).

Now that many people are surfing the net through iPhones and other smartphones they want to do things that are beyond the scope of the tiny piece of handheld software and that heavy lifting is being done on the backend. But it’s nothing new, it’s how Google Maps works, it’s the way search engines work, it’s the way anything that stream audio or video works. It may be more prevalent now but it’s not new.

And it’s not 100% online like most people think, it still relies on your browser and the java and flash (siverlight, air) plugins to do the front end computing for you. The only functions handled on the backend are the simplest database functions and data storage.

Take something like Mint. Financial reports are just basic excel style spreadsheets made pretty for you with some graphs. You can make your own by importing bank data to excel, uploading it to a public access FTP and getting a copy from any remote site you access from. It’s all existing, not to mention old, technology and ideas. It just took Mint to make a business plan to organize it all for you so all you had to do was look at a pretty website. No new “cloud” technology was invented or used in the process, just re-appropriating old technology in a new way.

Hence “Cloud Computing” isn’t a new technology on the internet, just an improved business model serving you the same data that’s always been there.

Mint is always being hyped at TechCrunch, probably because they “Discovered” them through one of their little techcrunch parties. Anyway, it’s never appealed to me at all.

It’s basically an online site for you to manage all your finances. A website that you send all of your most sensitive info to and you give them access to your personal bank accounts. Perhaps the most tightly guarded and vulnerable information you have all stored by a tech startup “in the cloud” as people love to say now.

I personally use Quicken for the same things, the main benefit is that all my finances are stored at my house, on a server, encrypted, password protected, in a folder that can only be accessed from one home computer, with backups on a physical CD that can only be acquired through breaking and entering.

I’ve been on the internet since before it was called the internet, and back in the early nineties I learned that if anybody asks you for your financial information you say no, no questions asked, just turn and run. I know that Mint probably goes through a lot of hoops to protect your information but the key word is “probably” and when it comes to my financial information I don’t risk it with “probably” especially when there is a better alternative available. Especially when they’re already crunching the data from their customers “anonymized data” and selling it to marketing companies to better target consumers. If Mint was a bit more established, or had the backing of a large federally insured and regulated bank that I had a bit more outside oversight I might feel a bit safer. At the very least I’d hope they had a huge team of lawyers advising them just how big of trouble they can get in from seemingly tiny missteps regarding people’s financial information.

Well guess what?

Intuit, the owners of Quicken, Quickbooks, and Turbotax, just acquired them. Quicken already provides online backup and has an online component but their software has always had a higher learning curve and takes some getting used to (it’s better than it used to be). But Mint has a much more user friendly interface that even the “iPhone generation” of tech users learn. Hopefully they can adapt their backend software to utilize the mint interface and vice versa.

I still don’t know about moving all my financial information out of their locked cabinet and onto the cloud where it can be (more easily) hacked. But I think online financial software is a bit more trustworthy now that it’s got some heavy financial guns backing it and it’s not just a tech startup anymore. At the very least maybe now they’ll know to put “We will sell your anonymized data to marketers for our own profit” in the small print on their pages.