Is cloud computing the Hotel California of tech?
In the cloud, no one cares about your software license. That is one of the most liberating--and frustrating--things about cloud computing.
Depending on your perspective, it either opens up computing or closes it off. Customers don't seem to care one way or another, happily shoveling data into cloud services like Google, Facebook, and others without (yet) wondering what will happen when they want to leave.
Cloud computing may just be the Hotel California of technology.
Google Trader
(Credit: Google)I say this because even for companies, like Google, that articulate open-data policies, the cloud is still largely a one-way road into Web services, with closed data networks making it difficult to impossible to move data into competing services. Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that. Social networks aren't very social with one other, as recently noted on the Autonomo.us mailing list.
For the freedom-inclined among us, this is cause for concern. For the capitalists, it's just like Software 1.0 all over again, with fat profits waiting to be had.
The great irony, of course, is that it's all built with open source.
In this cloud computing/Web 2.0 world, infrastructure needs to be cheap, flexible, and plentiful. Open source delivers all three.
Hence, we've seen companies like MySpace tripping all over themselves to open up parts of their platforms in order to make themselves more appealing to developers. As ReadWriteWeb wrote of Facebook back in 2007, however, such developer outreach has not opened up these Web platforms in the sense of providing useful off-ramps to services like Twitter, Digg, Facebook, etc. It has simply created more on-ramps.
Cue the nefarious Microsoft theme song.
Rather than wringing our hands over this, I think there's an opportunity to create amazing amounts of good (and wealth) in this open/closed Web. Frankly, the longer we're in this, the less it's going to matter whether the code is open or closed because, as Tim O'Reilly has been saying for years, data is the heart of the Web, and even open data isn't going to hurt a successful vendor's network effects.
Take Google Trader, an interesting new SMS application that helps people buy and sell goods through text messaging. As The Economist notes, however, one of Google Trader's most interesting applications is in helping to foster free markets in emerging economies:
Lastly there is Google Trader, a text-based system that matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce and commodities. Sellers send a message to say where they are and what they have to offer, which will be available to potential buyers within 30km for seven days. Mr Makawa says his father used the service to look for a buyer for some pigs, which he sold to pay school fees. These services cost 110 shillings ($0.05) a time, the same as a standard text message, except for Google Trader, which costs double that. In their first five weeks the services received a total of more than 1m queries.
I'm not familiar with the economics of SMS, but I'm guessing that Google gets a cut of the messages its application generates. The more useful Google Trader becomes, the more SMS it generates, the more commissions Google collects.
For the entrepreneurs using Google's service, they could possibly care less whether Google Trader is open source, but Google might. Open the source (and the API to the service), and let a thousand add-on development projects bloom. The more useful and feature-rich the Trader application, the more SMS, the more...you get the picture.
Take me to Google, Earthling.
The key is to create an open Web platform, one into which a diverse array of mobile software services can tie. This is one reason Google is such an advocate for open source. Android and other projects bring more people to the Web, a Web that Google monetizes through proprietary services like AdWords.
The community is critical to building upon the platform, but the money is in control of the platform and provisioning of services therefrom.
Just ask Amazon.com. According to ZDNet, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service makes roughly $220 million per year. That's a lot of cash, and is a function of EC2 sitting at the heart of a growing developer community, one that builds upon Amazon's open APIs to the service.
Some companies like Cloudera and Red Hat will make piles of cash providing the infrastructure for this cloud-computing gold rush. But the biggest money of all will be those that can build platforms in the cloud, platforms that depend upon open source but which aren't open in the traditional open-source license sense of the word.
That traditional licensing world is dead. Open-source licensing has become an on-ramp to closed data services, hardly what its creators envisaged. In fact, proprietary cloud vendors are almost certainly going to become the biggest cheerleaders for open source, because it means more developers creating more on-ramps to the cloud.
Even if such providers create effective exits, it's unlikely that consumers and businesses will actively use them...
...just like in the Software 1.0 world.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
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Rafael
I have no interest in moving full function apps on there. Ask anyone who's worked in Excel to use Google's spreadsheets and you'll have one unhappy customer, because none of the nifty tricks and shortcuts that make Excel so powerful are there. It's great for displaying simple info and sharing among friends, but it's not a substitute for a real program.
Another example is the Palm Pre. The "synergy" format is very appealing, but has its limitations. Having a server pull all my contact info into a merged abstract does bring functionality and convenience, but there are some caveats once you "outsource" your info. All my contact info is now in whatever Palm format they use, so if I decide to go elsewhere in two years, I don't just have a SIM card full of contacts, I have whatever random unseen blob is Palm's proprietary format.
Ditto for music. Right now I have a hard drive of full albums (finally) tagged perfectly and grouped how I want them in FLAC format with mp3 copies. I have complete control over those files regardless of what application I use and can move them around as I please. Pandora is nice for streaming on the go, but I would never want music on the "cloud" as a standard because I'd lose the categorization necessary to make any collection this large manageable (take genres for instance). Also, I'd be stuck with crappy compressed & streamed versions over my Nu Force amps and ATC speakers.
Think about even web mail. You probably use it with the assumption it'll always be there, but there's really no provision for pulling that data elsewhere should Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc go under. I try not to keep essentials in Gmail, but it's very tempting to since it's "permanent". Having something like a standardized email file type would be fantastic, because then you could just download your folder of *.eml files (or whatever) every so often, back them up, dump them into any email app or any other webmail account, etc.
Basically it boils down to this: the proprietary, unseen, "you don't need to worry about it" aspect of cloud computing is a no-go. If you want to develop online applications that use commoditized, standard file types so that people can upload them, download them, and take them elsewhere, you'll get a much better response. But these companies and cloud-cheerleaders seem to take the mindset of "oh it's so easy to have us take your info and of COURSE you'll just use our service forever so don't worry about every getting anything out in a usable form".
But assuming all that gets taken care of, there's still the issue of proprietary-everything and that awful philosophy that all users are mindless and should just dump everything in, remain ignorant of what's going on behind the scenes, and stay tied to that location forever.
I don't think Gmail will disappear any time soon, but I have no clue what its status will be in 5 years, much less 10, and that's just email. I certainly won't be turning over other essentials and just agreeing to use whatever interface some company chooses to give me down the road.
Look at online banking. You can pull out transactions in fairly standardized spreadsheet format, take it to programs like Quicken, upload it elsewhere, etc. A *.eml extension for email would be great, so that you could pull and archive all your webmail, throw it into third party software, switch providers, etc. Ditto for contact info--Palm and everyone else could then organize the data however they want on their end, but at the end of the day you'd have a nice folder of standardized ".ctc" files you could pull, organize on your PC, and take elsewhere.
As I said before, the top-down, "use our interface and don't worry about it, you're not supposed to leave our service anyway" approach will guarantee the "cloud" never gets anything more important than Myspace pages.
Please fire this ignorant open source zealot.
Open Source died when Oracle bought mySQL. Apache is irrelevent, and it always has been.
I'd take a single Windows 2008 Web Server (that supports 4 processors and 16gb ram) for $300.. any day of the week.. over some P.O.S. open source crudware.
It's time for impartial reporting-- kick this openSource zealot to the road because his ridiculous points of view ruin your website.
-Aaron
DBA / Developer
Surf to netcraft.com and see how wrong you are.
Open Source has already won.
It runs the Web, Cloud, Data Centers, phones, robots, etc.
The list is too long.
I'd say that "various closed versions of open-source, with heavy massaging and dedicated support, have won". And that makes sense, because if you're a business providing services to a ton of users you can afford to take a template, put out the resources to fit it to your needs, and pay someone to manage it.
That's also why that open source revolution in the home that's always just around the corner never seems to materialize. Some people like building kit cars and staying on top of the maintenance, but most people still buy a complete car and just have the oil and filter changed when it needs it.
Everyone doesn't need to know how to use the exit ramps, either. As long as we've got companies around like lifestreambackup.com we'll be able to backup (and restore?) our mission critical data. The lifestreambackup guys are adding services as a critical mass of customer request them (or pay to have it added?).
Your Facebook/Myspace account? I realize those are pretty insignificant in terms of data, but that's the point. Those are on the cloud because they have no importance. The cloud cult wants everything on there, which would leave you tied to a dozen different companies and their proprietary formats that you can't use yourself in the event they go under, you find a better option, or just don't like the direction you go in.
http://www.dataliberation.org/
For the most part, all of Google's services allow an end user to take their data, but it's still al little tech-oriented. The data liberation imperative should make it easier for all users to move their data in and out of Google's services easily.
In other news, I have a video about how big my uptime is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qJfhZHKlaw --- OpSource commissioned me to make it. It's about cloud computing. Enjoy!
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/
These are constantly evolving and between these APIs and support for standard protocols (IMAP, WebDAV) I can say that most of our user's content could be sucked back out of Google Apps. We are already practicing this by making onsite backups of docs and sites for our staff and faculty to comply with discovery and litigation rules.
The "cloud" is a meaningless term, that you can write so much about it is simultaneously hilarious and sad. At least you have seemed to stop using "web 2.0", hopefully this newest buzzword will go away soon as well.
- by blitz303 October 7, 2009 1:50 PM PDT
- For the entrepreneurs using Google's service, they could possibly care less whether Google Trader is open source
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(20 Comments)Don't you mean they couldn't care less, or are you saying that the entrepreneurs care somewhat that it's open source?