It’s time for Microsoft to rethink its approach to the cloud. The cloud stinks.
The personal computer revolution began as an attempt to move away from centralized control, allowing people to have a system that was powerful, yet individualized. Big companies who hogged computing were seen as evil. Soon everything became self-contained and desktop-centric. There was desktop publishing, desktop marketing, desktop mapping. Now everything is supposed to move to that mainframe in the sky—the cloud.
But the cloud stinks. Its applications have always been much slower than their desktop counterparts. Try to get to the end cell of a large cloud-based shreadsheet. You’ll long for the desktop version. The whole process is exacerbated by the speed of the Internet. The Internet is also unreliable. A couple of weeks ago, I was down for two hours. A month ago, I lost my connection for 20-plus hours.
And where is Microsoft in all of this? The company seems to keep forgetting what business it’s in. While Windows 7 and Office continue to be huge cash cows with no end in sight, the company is encouraging the idea of cloud computing by claiming that that is the direction it’s headed in, as well. Huh?
Why isn’t Microsoft trying to derail cloud computing? That’s what I would be doing it its position. It should think about killing Hotmail on a whim and saying, “there’s your cloud computing. Look what happened!” That, ultimately, is the real issue with the cloud. It’s not like your shrink wrapped software or even a stand alone download software package, which you essentially own and control. What would happen if Microsoft killed Hotmail? What would users do?
Read the terms of service to find out. The company can essentially do whatever it wants. You have no recourse. More onerous is the fact that almost every license agreement says that the company can change the wording whenever it wants to whatever it wants. All cloud action is essentially ethereal. Now you see it, now you don’t. Whatever happened to all of those old Geocities and AOL Websites, anyway?
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Here’s a proposed Microsoft advertisement:
A friend laments that his cloud-based software has stopped working. The company wants to charge him a fortune to return his data. His pal smiles and says, “you wouldn’t have this problem with Microsoft packaged software. It runs on your machine! It’s yours. You control it. Nobody can take it away from you. Nobody can discontinue your account. It just works!”
“Wow, Jim. Why didn’t someone tell me about this earlier? You mean I don’t have to keep going online to do my work?
“That’s right! And there’s no monthly fee!”
“No monthly fee? Where do I sign up?”
“It comes in a box. It installs itself.”
“I’m sold! Thanks Microsoft!”
That sort of commercial will never happen, of course. Microsoft sees cloud computing as a better way to make more money.
And cloud computing does have its place as a substitute for large IT departments in large corporations. It’s cheaper. That’s what the cloud is really about. It’s not about usurping freedom from the individual users and charging them more money. That’s where the cloud fails.
From the beginning Microsoft was a company that enabled the individual PC user. Now it talks about the cloud like everyone else. Microsoft really needs to rethink its approach.