Many years ago (way back in the 80's when we rode in covered wagons to work, and...) PC's were "new", someone was always coming up with "the next big idea". One of these were something we called "RAM Drives" - essentially memory based drives. You could buy a PC board that was about as big as a real surfboard (dual-use too!) and it would give you a whopping extra megabyte (yes, 1) of "memory disk".

Sometimes we would store our games on those drives because they would run faster, other times some people used them for business because things would load and save faster.

Then came the stunning realization that if you didnt backup your RAM Drive, when power went out, or you turned off your PC, all that data would go "poof!" and be gone. In the end, RAM Drives never really caught on. Why? Because they were a dumb idea in the long run.

Enter the Cloud. Now let's see - I take my vital data - store is somewhere a million miles from my home or business - and depend on a company that doesn't really give a rat's backside about me compared to its Enterprise customers, and trust that this is all yet another "next big idea"...

The Next Big Idea theory has one weakness... Only a small percentage of the Next Big Ideas are actually good ideas. To those who believe in the Cloud I say, good luck. If you trust that you matter and you don't mind losing your data, whether its business, personal or a mix of both, because you have kid yourself that you are a "valued customer" - good luck indeed.

For my money, Cloud computing as a whole is another dumb idea.... As so many companies and corporations are now starting to see.