The Cloud ! You have to be kidding !

I spend a lot of time on the Internet. You might say I am a “web power user”. My idea of a typical day on the web is to have 10 to 20 tabs opened on IE 8 and quickly browsing one article after the other. It starts this way …

I have on my favorites list a folder called “Search”. This folder has numerous links to online computer magazine sites (and some news sites). I select the first online mag link and quickly browse for articles of interest. I right click links on the web page and display them in another tab. I then select another computer mag site from my favorites and do it again and again. By the time I am done, I have 10 to 20 tabs on IE.

Now I have DSL broadband, 768 K. Because I live close to an industrial park I really get the full 768 K from it. Now it does not take long for my PC to slow down to an absolute crawl. I am always “waiting and waiting”. Once in awhile, maybe because of storms, some part of the web goes down and some web pages are simply inaccessable (or slow).

Having spent so much time on the internet, I can honestly say, I can not imagine having to depend upon the internet to run common applications. The idea of the “cloud” to run important applications is just unthinkable. Sure, the cloud has some benefits, but it also has many pitfalls which I doubt can be overcome. Especially for people who live in rural areas, dependence upon the cloud just does not make any sense at all. Its bad enough that todays computers have bloated operating systems and bloated software, but to add to this slow internet connections and poor download speeds, plus possible interruptions of service, then you have a nightmare for the average person.

I have always felt that programmers tend to live in a world of their own, having bleeding edge computers, super high speed broadband, etc. They don’t live in the real world of the common person. Fortunately, I don’t live in such a world. I live on a tight budget in a rural area, so I don’t have bleeding edge computers (can you say “Walmart” !), nor do I have super fast broadband.  I can grasp what the average common person experiences and I really don’t think the “cloud” is the panacea many think it to be. Nothing can beat well written native software, which has a small footprint, optimized for speed running directly on your computer without any need for the internet.