The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem
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The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem
#2Great articulation of what makes so many of us uneasy about cloud computing.
While I'm not sure I agree with the anti-authoritarian reason for the outrage over cheese-moving (I think people just generally don't like change), the cognitive dissonance over saying we don't trust while acting like we do does ring true.
I wrote a bit about what I hope is the swinging pendulum between centralized and distributed computing, and where I hope this is headed in a blog post a while ago: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/6277876911/the-personal-cloud
Re: The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem
#3Great articulation of what makes so many of us uneasy about cloud computing. While I'm not sure I agree with the anti-authoritarian reason for the outrage over cheese-moving (I think people just generally don't like change), the cognitive dissonance over saying we don't trust while acting like we do does ring true. I wrote a bit about what I hope is the swinging pendulum between centralized and distributed computing,…
The pendulum may be swinging, but I'm not sure I see it. Mobile computing isn't really different from the PC/web of the 90s. The shift is in the access pattern, not the access paradigm. Napster/Kazaa/BitTorrent is an example of the pendulum swinging. The Web was originally envisioned as an open access community, but we have yet to move it beyond the client-server (centralized) paradigm. Home servers preserve this paradigm. Many of us here run home servers because we're geeks, but that doesn't apply to most people on Facebook. Look at Diaspora: great idea (wrest control of our data from Facebook), but still the centralized (seed/server) paradigm.
Distributed computing at the level we want is still WAY too hard for the end user. The goal should be to make it as simple as using Facebook today, but retaining control in a much better way than Facebook or Google let us do now.
Re: The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem
#4Amazon isn't in the habit of moving my files around, or even changing their API's. It's also far from rent-free. I enjoy having "my mom" clean my room. It means I don't have to run my own IT infrastructure in a company of 4 with barely any cashflow. One click... deploy to the world's most advanced Web infrastructures (EngineYard, Heroku, Amazon, Etc) and for relatively little cost.
Re: The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem
#5Great articulation of what makes so many of us uneasy about cloud computing. While I'm not sure I agree with the anti-authoritarian reason for the outrage over cheese-moving (I think people just generally don't like change), the cognitive dissonance over saying we don't trust while acting like we do does ring true. I wrote a bit about what I hope is the swinging pendulum between centralized and distributed computing,…
The pendulum may be swinging, but I'm not sure I see it. Mobile computing isn't really different from the PC/web of the 90s. The shift is in the access pattern, not the access paradigm. Napster/Kazaa/BitTorrent is an example of the pendulum swinging. The Web was originally envisioned as an open access community, but we have yet to move it beyond the client-server (centralized) paradigm. Home servers preserve this par…
I agree with you, and my great hope is that there is (or will be) enough of a market opportunity for someone to exploit. The market would be for a productized distributed cloud solution that's simple to set up and maintain.
The target demographic would be people who are concerned enough about privacy, ownership of online identity, and government access to corporate cloud data to pay for a self-operated solution.
The prerequisites for this to be viable as I see it are: cheap enough hardware; cheap enough full-access pipes; enough demand; good enough UX. The first two seem fairly obviously on the right path. The third I'm not sure, and the fourth is under the control of the vendor.
[Edit: Maybe wide publicization of stuff like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3036157 will help with the demand? Hey, a guy can hope, right?]
Re: The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem
#6Amazon isn't in the habit of moving my files around, or even changing their API's. It's also far from rent-free. I enjoy having "my mom" clean my room. It means I don't have to run my own IT infrastructure in a company of 4 with barely any cashflow. One click... deploy to the world's most advanced Web infrastructures (EngineYard, Heroku, Amazon, Etc) and for relatively little cost.
The original article is much more about end-user SaaS type cloud experiences than the IaaS or PaaS services you're mentioning. The nature of SaaS is that it is directly facing the end-user. IaaS or PaaS services are more B2B style and so the customer and the end-user are not the same.
The different nature of the SaaS beast doesn't mean that IaaS or PaaS systems are any less vulnerable to things going wrong (see the EBS outage earlier this year). But Iaas and PaaS providers are more vulnerable to customer loss if APIs change (due to the instantaneous breakage) than SaaS providers are if UIs change.
Re: The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem
#7Great articulation of what makes so many of us uneasy about cloud computing. While I'm not sure I agree with the anti-authoritarian reason for the outrage over cheese-moving (I think people just generally don't like change), the cognitive dissonance over saying we don't trust while acting like we do does ring true. I wrote a bit about what I hope is the swinging pendulum between centralized and distributed computing,…
The pendulum may be swinging, but I'm not sure I see it. Mobile computing isn't really different from the PC/web of the 90s. The shift is in the access pattern, not the access paradigm. Napster/Kazaa/BitTorrent is an example of the pendulum swinging. The Web was originally envisioned as an open access community, but we have yet to move it beyond the client-server (centralized) paradigm. Home servers preserve this par…
I was excited about Opera Unite because it did make setting up a small webserver really easy for end users. Unfortunately slow residential upload speeds, lack of a must-have app to run on it, and Opera's small user-base mean that it didn't go anywhere.
The responses to Opera's marketing also indicated that a lot of people didn't understand what a server was. It launched about the same time as Google Wave, and both products had marketing campaigns which emphasized how easy each product made communicating with friends. As a result, many of the comments I saw on forums were people asking if the products functioned identically.
I feel that if it had launched with a peer to peer social networking application that synced messages and photos between friends, it might have been significantly more popular.
Re: The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pendulum may be swinging, but I'm not sure I see it. Mobile computing isn't really different from the PC/web of the 90s. The shift is in the access pattern, not the access paradigm. Napster/Kazaa/BitTorrent is an example of the pendulum swinging. The Web was originally envisioned as an open access community, but we have yet to move it beyond the client-server (centralized) paradigm. Home servers preserve this par…
I agree with you, and my great hope is that there is (or will be) enough of a market opportunity for someone to exploit. The market would be for a productized distributed cloud solution that's simple to set up and maintain. The target demographic would be people who are concerned enough about privacy, ownership of online identity, and government access to corporate cloud data to pay for a self-operated solution. The…
From my point of view, full-access pipes are the problem. Asymmetric connections, bandwidth caps, incoming port filtering, etc are all de rigueur for large fixed line ISPs these days. This is especially true in North America. The mobile connectivity picture here is even worse.
Demand can be generated, if you do it correctly. The hardware is less of a challenge if you do the distributed computing on several layers at once. Apple has shown us the way on UI/UX, as has science fiction literature for decades now.
We'll never get completely away from client-server (especially with mobile computing), and that needs to be part of the design. But we have seen the power of peer to peer networks, and even some kind of proxy network between the p2p base and mobile clients could be done in a non-evil way.
Re: The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem
#9I, too, have felt the irritation of seeing a service that worked exactly the way I liked it changed. It can be annoying but I don't see any way to escape this, aside from writing your own web apps.
Re: The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem
#10Amazon isn't in the habit of moving my files around, or even changing their API's. It's also far from rent-free. I enjoy having "my mom" clean my room. It means I don't have to run my own IT infrastructure in a company of 4 with barely any cashflow. One click... deploy to the world's most advanced Web infrastructures (EngineYard, Heroku, Amazon, Etc) and for relatively little cost.
It's funny that you mention Amazon, as they are updating their website UI when I feel that the old one is perfectly fine, but what can I say? It is their website.