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.

Providers of Big Cloud providers love it because it's a ginormous goldmine.  Software developers and academia love Big Cloud because it's more fun than a barrel of monkeys (shiny, golden monkeys...).  Users are attracted to Big Cloud because it endows them with some magical abilities ("Syncspelliarmus!"™) without having to engage their own technological or intellectual resources.  But as always, there's a price.  And for many, if they knew what that price was, they'd keep their feet on the ground.

The questions demanding answer are few and simple:  how could it cost me, how much could it cost me, how likely is it to cost me, and what cost is acceptable to me.  The answers, however, take work, and a non-trivial amount of it.  But with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy -- "if you're usin' the cloud without understandin' the cloud...you might be a sucker."

So, heed the warnings.  Take the sales pitches with grains of salt.  Read the fine print.  Do the homework.  Who knows...soon enough, users may tire of perpetual subscription fees, unintended consequences, lack of ownership, and lack of control; the inexorable march of progress may enable attractive personal "cloud" server appliances; and the pendulum may swing back, away from mainframe computing and towards personal computing once again.