hey! you! get off my cloud
Posted on April 23, 2008 by Martin Zagorsek
You know a trend is about to go mainstream when Microsoft announces an initiative to support it. This morning’s NYT article reminded me of Bill Gates’ mid-’90s epiphany that the Internet was going to be important. Better late than never, I guess, and you have to give Microsoft credit for elbowing their way into significant (if not leading) market shares after arriving late to the party.
Cloud computing is a particularly interesting reversal for Microsoft, and one that makes me feel somewhat ambivalent. The company’s leadership has always been PC-centric, and while this made them look archaic when they resisted the Internet wave, there was always a “power to the little people” aspect of their approach that I found appealing. Keep in mind that these are people who grew up in an era when nobody owned their own computer, if you wanted to use one you had to go to your nearest mainframe and get in line for your share of its precious processing cycles.
Of course in most ways the Internet actually increased the power of individuals. By giving anyone with a cheap PC the ability to not only consume but produce content across nearly any physical boundaries, it’s hard not to argue we’ve been liberated by it. And while the worries about electronic privacy have moved beyond the curmudgeons and into a small (though vocal) concerned minority, nobody seriously argues that the risks outweigh the benefits.
Cloud computing somehow feels different, and carries many echoes of our time-sharing mainframe past. While most consumers have no idea what a mainframe is (and to an ordinary user, a “grid” or “cloud” is just a new kind of mainframe), I wonder whether its implications will mesh well with basic human nature, or at least the Western materialistic version of it that I’m familiar with.
Why is iTunes so much more successful than Rhapsody or Pandora? Why is the adoption of Google Apps so slow despite its many advantages? Why do people buy vacation homes that they only visit for one or two weeks a year, when it would be far more economical (never mind convenient) to rent them? When I moved to Manhattan in 2001, it didn’t take long to realize I could rent a car as often as I wanted and it would cost me less than insurance and garage fees if I kept my own. But even though I sold my car, I have many friends who kept theirs, and I often envy them.
Why do we like to own things when there are clear financial and logistical advantages to using shared resources? There are plenty of possible answers, many of them emotional ones like control, security, or pride of possession. I don’t mean to delve into the human psyche too deeply, I only wonder how this quirk of our natures will affect, or be affected by the apparent swing of the computing pendulum back to large communal computing resources. If we’re lucky, we can even have the “thin client” debates of the ’90s all over again.
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