No offense intended, but one of the iron laws of technology is that stupid ideas never die, they just come back with a trendier name. The fact is that “cloud” computing was already used several decades ago, and it proved inferior to stand-alone computers. It just wasn’t called the “cloud,” it was called the “workstation.”
Central application-hosting and storage were originally introduced because of technological and financial limitations (i.e. processing power was expensive). But the workstation model did prove two things: the limitations of individual workstations overrode the supposed benefits of not having to outfit an entire computer for every employee, and computer and software manufacturers LOVE the workstation model, because it increases both the dependency and cost of abandonment (see Sun Microsystems for a case in point). What tech company wouldn’t love to have total control over your hardware and software, with the cost of your going elsewhere being prohibitively expensive?
If the workstation model was efficient, it would not have been abandoned when the cost of stand-alone PCs dropped to an affordable level (especially since the “connectivity” was much better internally than the internet will ever be). That was obviously not the case. The Google (and Microsoft, et al.) dream of simple, cheap front-end computers with all of the apps and content hosted elsewhere is nothing more than the technology of the past with a new paint-job.
P.S., only urban-dwellers on the East or West Coast could assert that internet connectivity is near “universal.” All that the cloud is going to do is force companies to relocate to urban areas... and it’s not like this country needs larger and more politically powerful cities...
With cloud storage, you have chunks of your data distributed across potentially thousands of different servers. No one server will contain the entire file (security) and the data chunks will be replicated in many locations (redundancy).
So if one (or even many) servers go down or offline, you will still be able to recover your data from the other servers.
So the absolute opposite of what you are talking about.
>>one of the iron laws of technology is that stupid ideas never die, they just come back with a trendier name.
.
I was at a “cloud computing” event a few years ago and one of the speakers started his talk by saying “I got started as an Application Service Provider about a decade ago, then I did Software as a Service, and now I do Cloud Computing.”
The room, most of which had been around the block a time or two, laughed heartily.