Mayayana
| the cloud is *not* a fad.

Says you.

It's obviously a fad. That's not in question.

Whether cloud is an improvement or not, and whether it's a good plan for companies, is a hot topic. And of course, the fact that you feel a need to assert adamantly that it's not a fad is a good example of just what a hot topic it is.

| a cloud outage might be annoying, but the data won't be lost.

Says you. That's part of the ongoing discussion. Data could be lost. Anyone who stored data on Megaupload lost it.

But the issue is more a general discussion about the pros and cons of cloud. The possible cons are lack of security and instability. An outage might not usually be such a big deal, but it raises the question of whether corporate cloud services are really the best solution for business computing.... or personal computing, for that matter.

Likewise, when the Feds take over Megaupload or a judge demands all of someone's deleted gmail (from Google, not from the person in question) it calls into question the general security of the cloud model.

Does it really make sense to rent storage with limited rights when one could do one's own storage? The only compelling argument for cloud storage is convenience.

Corporate cloud services exist almost entirely as a profit strategy (as distinct from private clouds). That's somewhat of a elephant in the room. While the pros and cons of cloud are fairly easy to delineate, the discussion gets heated because there's a big marketing push toward cloud. You read media wiseacres who are shills for big tech companies and suddenly you're a fanatic pro-clouder, despite having no particular reason or motive of your own to justify such an extreme viewpoint.

OSs have matured. Business software has matured. People are not waiting in line anymore to get Intel's latest chip or Adobe's latest update.

If that were not true, no one would be talking about cloud. They'd be too busy taking checks to the bank, as they were in the 90s.

But now it's a much more mature business and companies are strategizing how to make more money out of it.

Enter SaaS: What if we could charge for usage of the product, rather than just charging for the product itself? The extras like online storage are just smoke and mirrors to obscure the real issues.

*Cloud is a fad precisely because it has to be marketed heavily in order to sell. As a strategy to get more money from customers, it doesn't have sufficient selling points on its own to make it fly without getting a push.*