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technoshaman for the link: As most of you reading this likely know by now, Apple Inc.'s grand poohbah, Steve "We Don't Need No Steenking Desktop!" Jobs, announced yesterday that his company is introducing a new 'iCloud" service to encourage people to store their personal data and applications on Apple's servers instead of a desktop computer's or local server's hard drive. Legendary industry pundit and author Bob X. Cringely suggests in his latest blog article that Steverino's real aim in introducing iCloud is to destroy Microsoft Corp. and its longstanding IT hegemony.
As I posted on TS's blog awhile ago, my response is: I'm sorry, I ain't buyin' it (in either sense). Much though I respect Mr. Cringely, I think he and Jobs are both vastly overestimating consumers' willingness to entrust all their data (some of it quite private and potentially embarrassing, if not outright dangerous if made public) to someone else's server God and Apple's techs alone know where.
I worry enough already about hackers and other miscreants accessing my data through my web pages and the DSL pipe into my home, which is one reason my computers are never, ever left on when I'm not using them (the others are energy savings and reduction in wear and tear). The privacy argument gets even stronger for businesses with tons of precious proprietary data; to them, putting all that in "the cloud" is practically begging for industrial spies to hack into it and make off with their competitive advantage. I predict most CEOs—and their IT heads—will take an exceedingly dim view of the notion of leaving their company's data and software on any system they cannot directly monitor and control.
And what happens if the phone lines go down in a storm or terrorist attack? Unless you have a backup close at hand, you're screwed. I don't even keep my personal files on my computer's internal hard drive; I use an external one in case the Mac goes on the fritz, so I can access it from a working computer. (With the laptop, I don't have a choice but to use the internal drive...but I keep a backup externally.)
For both mechanical and security reasons, the locally-owned-and-controlled PC, server(s) and LAN are not going away anytime soon no matter what SPJ thinks he can muscle users into. Readers with more knowledge of the industry and the systems involved than I (which is to say about 2/3 of my f-list) are welcome to try arguing me out of this opinion.
technoshaman for the link: As most of you reading this likely know by now, Apple Inc.'s grand poohbah, Steve "We Don't Need No Steenking Desktop!" Jobs, announced yesterday that his company is introducing a new 'iCloud" service to encourage people to store their personal data and applications on Apple's servers instead of a desktop computer's or local server's hard drive. Legendary industry pundit and author Bob X. Cringely suggests in his latest blog article that Steverino's real aim in introducing iCloud is to destroy Microsoft Corp. and its longstanding IT hegemony.As I posted on TS's blog awhile ago, my response is: I'm sorry, I ain't buyin' it (in either sense). Much though I respect Mr. Cringely, I think he and Jobs are both vastly overestimating consumers' willingness to entrust all their data (some of it quite private and potentially embarrassing, if not outright dangerous if made public) to someone else's server God and Apple's techs alone know where.
I worry enough already about hackers and other miscreants accessing my data through my web pages and the DSL pipe into my home, which is one reason my computers are never, ever left on when I'm not using them (the others are energy savings and reduction in wear and tear). The privacy argument gets even stronger for businesses with tons of precious proprietary data; to them, putting all that in "the cloud" is practically begging for industrial spies to hack into it and make off with their competitive advantage. I predict most CEOs—and their IT heads—will take an exceedingly dim view of the notion of leaving their company's data and software on any system they cannot directly monitor and control.
And what happens if the phone lines go down in a storm or terrorist attack? Unless you have a backup close at hand, you're screwed. I don't even keep my personal files on my computer's internal hard drive; I use an external one in case the Mac goes on the fritz, so I can access it from a working computer. (With the laptop, I don't have a choice but to use the internal drive...but I keep a backup externally.)
For both mechanical and security reasons, the locally-owned-and-controlled PC, server(s) and LAN are not going away anytime soon no matter what SPJ thinks he can muscle users into. Readers with more knowledge of the industry and the systems involved than I (which is to say about 2/3 of my f-list) are welcome to try arguing me out of this opinion.
