Too Many Users of "Big Cloud" Big Suckers

I'm with Woz -- "Big Cloud" is not getting the wariness it deserves.  Too many consumers and businesses are inhaling the boundless volumes of hot, breathless hype and encouragement from providers and developers to skip due diligence.  Those users consequently place themselves at significant risk of significant harm without sufficient reason.

All it takes to avoid being a sucker is answering a few simple questions.  But Big Cloud is betting on today's users being too lazy, greedy, or easily distractible to answer the right questions sufficiently, much less ask them in the first place.  And so far it's been a winning bet.

     A clearer day for the Cloud.  For a PDF, click this.

Google Shopping Quits Web -- Time to Quit Google Shopping

Google Shopping.  Google Products.  Froogle.  Whatever you call it, it used to be the world's far-and-away most complete online shopping search engine.  That was by virtue of being simply another form of the world's far-and-away most complete index of Web pages, Google Web.  "Used to be" -- because by the end of fall 2012, Google will have quietly junked its decade-old service of giving shoppers the whole World-Wide Web filtered of only those pages lacking something for sale, and replaced it wholesale with a completely unrelated middleman "service" blocking any visibility between shoppers and sellers who do not pay (and pay, and pay, and keep on paying...).  While, of course, continuing to make it appear exactly the same...apparently in the hopes that nobody important will notice.  Sneaky-sneaky, sir...ole'.