Cloud computing, “information on demand,” or “application service providers” — it doesn’t matter what name you use. The basic concept behind all these ideas is that networking should enable people to stop buying and installing applications locally on their PCs. In 2000-01, the “ASP” model intended to move most (if not all) applications to central providers, like Jamcracker and other startups. Data would live locally, while applications ran over the net. It succeeded…somewhat.

Then, a few years later, “on demand” computing became the new buzzword. This was the idea of moving not only applications, but also computing horsepower (i.e. CPU cycles and so forth) to the network. IBM and others got into this model, and are still pushing it today. Overall it’s a good idea. Why go buy a bunch of big iron (i.e. servers, computing systems, and storage) if you only need it now and then? It’s really just a newfangled way of doing what we called “timesharing” in decades past.

Then the “cloud” idea popped up. That moved not only applications and compute cycles, but also your data to the service provider’s systems. Under this model, you basically need only PCs with browsers and email (and maybe not even the latter) in house. The rest lives on virtual servers at your provider’s location. You use that horsepower as needed, and pay the bill at the end of the month.

However, Microsoft is behind the curve in terms of Cloud implementation…and it threatens their business model. So they’ve attempted to introduce some FUD to “warn” people about possible shortcomings of this new computing model. They’re trying to introduce some privacy concerns, which are definitely justified, in order to warn people away.

Of course, keeping the current “buy your software and you own it” model works just fine for the folks at Redmond. So they’re correct in saying that “privacy protections are essential to building the customer trust needed for cloud computing and the Internet to reach their full potential.” But behind that noble-sounding statement is the company’s worry that customers will rent, not buy, software and systems in the future.

Caveat emptor.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Industry, Privacy, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.