One of the aggravating things about university life is the tendency of those who have been educated beyond their native intelligence redefining simple things with catchy intellectual labels and making them more complex than they need to be. This has filtered down to other areas–the least of which is marketing. Take “The Cloud” for instance. This is fancy talk for data of one sort or another on someone else’s computers–and not your own. For years, we managed to describe this as ‘off site servers’ and ‘distributed computing’. Anything that is contained on the Internet is “in the cloud” to us.
It seems now that vendors of everything are looking at ‘cloud based solutions’ for everything from delivering computer programs on an as needed basis, to storing all of your images, data, and entertainment media. An article in the NYT helped drive this home:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/ar…ines&emc=tha26
What a catchy little name–dematerialize–and how appropriate to what can happen to your access or data. And a very catchy intellectual take on the matter. I always equated ‘dematerialize’ to making something disappear or cease to exist. And the bottom line here is that is what they are talking about here also. Some of these services are “free” up to a point. Then they charge based upon use and storage amount. Folks like Adobe (with their AIR program delivery system) and Microsoft want to dish all of their programs to you from the cloud. While they tout convenience–this is the ultimate in control–and increasing their revenue streams. Now, consider this;
ALL OF THIS REQUIRES A STABLE CONNECTION TO THE INTERNET. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE ONE–OR BETTER YET–WHEN YOU REACH YOUR BANDWIDTH LIMITS?
I find it interesting that this simple fact of internet use is omitted from discussions about ‘going to the cloud.’ Quite a few blog, article, and other internet discussions recently touch on how much bandwidth average users consume–and the lower limitations imposed by home service providers and cellular data plans. Consider for just a moment what happens to your bandwidth when suddenly your browser, office productivity suite, and other programs must stream down to you in order to use them. When every time you wish to look at your photos, listen to songs you have bought, or watch your home videos or movies you have purchased. Devices are moving toward forcing you to pay “rent” for all of your information and productivity–and essentially holding you hostage for when, where, cost, and how much access you have to it. And no real liability when they make mistakes or cannot provide you access.
Think real hard on this technology fans–it’s not a trendy, overly intellectual conversation. It’s a matter of fact coming to a device near you…
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Once upon a time, in a land far away—I bought my first computer. In 1985, I spent every dollar that I had to purchase a Compaq Portable Plus, the very first IBM PC compatible computer. This tasty box was all I could think about. It was a little over $3600, and had an incredible 128K of memory, and two 5 ¼” floppy drives that one was consumed by the operating system—DOS 3.2—in a case that resembled a sewing machine. It was wonderful! In those days, the race was not to upgrade your software, but to build the hardware system. By 1993, this 30 pound behemoth had a 1.44Mb floppy disk, a 20Mb hard disk, 640K of memory—a new Panasonic processor–with a 1Mb extension card. Good God, and a 9600 Bps modem!