I was interested to hear about Microsoft providing some services and storage in the "Cloud." I remember hearing about Amazon making disk space and computing services available to users.
So is this the next big thing for us? Microsoft's push of cloud services including software, storage, and more?
I'm not sure if it is, and I'm not completely sure what to make of it. Amazon's storage service might make some sense as a backup of your photos since it's not likely that you'd lose your hard drive and Amazon would lose theirs at the same time, but it could happen.
The worrisome thing is that while Amazon or Microsoft might tout their service as reliable, fault tolerant, etc., but the reality is that your 2GB or 4GB of stuff isn't valuable to them. They're not going to go through too many hoops to get that data back.
And if it's gone, it's gone.
Things always fail. Just think about the recent WGA problems, a service that you'd think that Microsoft would make sure is always working.
I think that the cloud computing makes some sense for a Windows Live type of service. If I could have the latest version of Word or Excel in the cloud, with local (automatic, hint, hint) backups made to my local device, that's pretty cool. Installing new versions of Office are a pain, especially when I almost never use Access, Powerpoint, or anything really beyond Word or Excel.
It would probably install some crazy ActiveX type DLLs and make my system just as flaky as it is now. But since I reboot about once a month when I get patches (or lose power ), maybe that isn't so bad.
Steve Jones
Still - it is strangely reminiscent of all of those "dirt cheap" ISP services that popped up a few years ago. Lots of folks jumped at them, not reading the fine print. The fine print only got read once the ISP had its first problem and the "critical" application running on this configuration was gone/scrambled/corrupted, and NO backup in sight (the ISP never promised one after all).
I'd imagine there will be a LONG shake-out, both in terms of tiering service levels and in the pricing models.
The 'Cloud' ???
No Way Jose !!!
MS already has their fingers into too much already, including our collective wallets. Do you want them to pilfer a 'few dollars more' for more (ususally less) of a service ?
Granted I want to know where my backups are. This is how it is and in all probability how it will always be for me. Granted there is a need for 'cloud' type storage and I do use it. It is called Google Documents and it's free ! Snce I have been using it it has been down only once and that was the gmail login for about 30 minutes. Not too bad for me using gmail for well over a couple of years. I remember the days of HotMail and MSN, all of the spam, and junk, the servers being down at least once a month (hell sometimes once or twice a week !). If MS could not make freebies HotMail and MSN fly like Google has with G-Mail and Google Documents, they do not belong in a pay-for-service industry <period>
I vote no to cloud services. Period.
The net is getting too congested as it is now and is unreliable just in connectivity let alone relying on somebody else's server. Yep, uploading larger JPEG's when the pipes are already full would be a lot of fun -not.
I would much prefer a home based Terminal Server setup. Maybe as an extension of M$ new Home Server product, maybe not.
Wireless thinclients are just starting to emerge on the market. Make it a tablet version and then issue one to everyone in the house.
Not for the serious gamers but I bet for almost everybody else, it would work just fine.
Pared with a version of a media server, then you've got it all. Office app's, photo editing, movies, music and maybe TV if you can find something worth watching.
Well, mostly all.
You could order your pizza but it won't answer the door for you.
Roomba's make GREAT frisbees!
They always come back.
Eventually...
