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Yeah, I know, the notion is that the existence and significance of the Internet has been old news for a while, it's a basic utility like tap water and power, and we are all supposed to be totally focused on Web 2.0 stuff and intrusive smartphone apps. There are still immigrants from a lot of places, and rural folks, and massively stubborn people, and other groups I haven't thought of, no doubt.
I'm not an fan of the big cloud computing fad, but over the last few years a lot of people seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid. There are a lot of other people like me who are deeply skeptical, and according to a survey I read about, a lot of IT department heads. To me it seems like an example of the old chestnut: if you want to be sure it's done right, do it yourself.
I've been using Yahoo Web-mail since 1999, and Google's Gmail since 2004, and found them satisfactory. It's been useful to me to be able to work my email from anybody's computer anywhere. Technically Web-mail is email in the cloud, of course, but I think that's as much cloud computing as I'm ever going to want.
I saw a manufacturing company try a cloud-based ERP package, and it was a disaster. It tended to slow way down in the afternoons, maybe because of re-indexing or something, and the users hated it. After eight or nine months they replaced it with a completely different locally-installed ERP system.
The main question to ponder about cloud stuff, I think, is what happens to you if it quits working? What if you and the service provider get into a dispute about payments and they cut you off? What if the provider suddenly goes out of business? Where's your data? If you can't take care of your customers because it quit on you, who's liable? Is it going to perform adequately and consistently day to day?
Real clouds up in the sky are just condensing water vapor, and I suspect the word vapor is also going to apply one day to a lot of the current hype about cloud computing.
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