Posts Tagged wired

The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing

Posted on January 27, 2009 by No Comments

Read a great article in Wired today:

Why Cloud Computing Still Doesn’t Work and how Google will Fix It – full article

I agree that the systems that would allow us to truly work in the cloud just suck at the moment (particularly in the mobile data transfer department). BUT I take issue to say that people aren’t already taking the first steps in moving to the cloud (for better or worse).

I think people are already moving to the cloud via social media tools. I have friends whose only copies of their digital photos are on Flickr or Facebook, and to me that seems like a mistake (even though Flickr will store full-res versions).

I’ll echo the point of some other comments in that what happens when a Google Data Center gets hacked, or a web service folds unexpectedly (anyone that got Circuit City gift cards this holiday season will know what I mean)?

There’s talk of a GDrive coming in 2009 that would either put all your docs on Google’s servers so that you can access them anywhere, or that it would be a piece of hardware that would ‘mirror’ your drive on their servers, keeping the most updated copies in each drive.

I love the idea of having things everywhere, but am not so keen on having copies of all my data on a 3rd party’s server . (I know, we already do that with email, photos, etc, but having EVERYTHING there puts a little too much trust in a web service).  I want my content accessible.  But I want to own it.  I want the control.

Furthermore, I don’t think we need a Google Drive to manage this for us. If you want to mirror your drives on the cloud, lets focus on a software based solution. Let’s innovate. Once again, I think Apple’s getting on the right track (and monetizing it) with their Mobile Me services. Has anyone reading this used it? Is it any good for docs?  Leave a comment.

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