Cloud Computing

One of FLG's biggest pet peeves about the technology industry is that it has the memory of a gnat and succumbs to irrational exuberance. Put simply, there's too little introspection and far too much unfounded optimism about the power of technology to completely reform the way human beings live. The odd thing is that technology people, again, because they've often had engineering educations, don't understand normal people. They get off on cool, elegant technology for cool, elegant technology's sake.

These utopian visions of a future world of awesomeness made possible by technology never quite pans out. For example, the idea that Twitter was going to free people from tyranny was always crazy.

Nevertheless, there is definitely some benefit from technology. A lot, actually, if you include medical technology. But as far as information technology goes, the biggest success so far is the Internet. Interesting thing about the Internet, is that it is a platform. (Platform is a buzzword in tech that FLG loathes, but it does apply to the Internet.) People can connect anything they want to the internet. Post to a blog. Create a website. Read books. Send email. Make a phone call. Write a new type of application that does whatever over the network. It's not like engineers said this is what you do on the Internet. They said, "here is a thing that will let you connect to any computer in the world." "Here's this thing called the World Wide Web and Html. They'll let you send pictures as well as text." What people did with that spans the whole gamut. From posting famous works of literature to porn. After the web came along, it was a technology useful to normal people.

Anyway, to return to my pet peeve. The geeks are all hard for this concept called Cloud Computing, which for those of you living in a cave on Mars with your fingers in your ears, is the idea that the software you use and the data you create is stored on the Internet somewhere. Webmail solutions, like hotmail and gmail? Cloud computing. Ditto Google Docs. In fact, Google is the big driver of this.

The benefits of this are pretty clear. You can access your data from any computer regardless of operating system. Plus, you don't have to worry about a harddrive failure on your PC. The downside is largely that you don't control your data as much anymore. It's out there in the ether, so security may be a bit of a concern. Plus, if Google goes down, then your screwed. It doesn't happen that often, but it has happens.

Well, this cloud computing concept has become all the rage among the digerati. And this is where FLG gets annoyed. Cloud computing is a throwback to the mainframe days. Yet, the computer geniuses can't see the parallels. Sure, there are differences. You can access your data from any computer in the world. That's an improvement. But the same fundamental issues that led to the adoption of the desktop PC over dumb tubes of the mainframe era still apply. Larry Ellison, who FLG generally thinks is a weenie, made similar points recently.

It is better to have a powerful processor and copious hard drive space entirely at your personal disposal than to share a cloud of computers for many applications. If they don't exist, then somebody is going to invent them. Number crunching, to take one example, is something that will often be better done on a computer that you have the highest priority on. It will take one big crash or loss of data to put the kibosh on this whole thing. The simple fact is that the Internet, while extremely robust, is less reliable and responsive a place to keep your data and applications than on your personal computer.

Where cloud computing does make some sense is for sharing data. For home users, this means posting photos to Flickr or whatever. But it makes the most sense for companies. Companies need to share, organize, and protect data. Put simply companies need to control data. Far better to have the data on a secure server in a secure room than to have excel files emailed about where the company has little way of tracking who has access or what's been modified. But again, what we are talking about here is the same reasons people have mainframes.

Technology is great. It's helpful. It's just so annoying when the people in the computer industry cream their pants about supposedly completely new technology that is really just a better version of what was already invented 60 years ago.