

The cloud's my-mom-cleaned-my-room problem - alexismadrigal
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-clouds-my-mom-cleaned-my-room-problem/245648/

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joebadmo
Great articulation of what makes so many of us uneasy about cloud computing.

While I'm not sure I agree with the anti-authoritarian reason for the outrage
over cheese-moving (I think people just generally don't like change), the
cognitive dissonance over saying we don't trust while acting like we do does
ring true.

I wrote a bit about what I hope is the swinging pendulum between centralized
and distributed computing, and where I hope this is headed in a blog post a
while ago: <http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/6277876911/the-personal-cloud>

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DanTheDuck
The pendulum may be swinging, but I'm not sure I see it. Mobile computing
isn't really different from the PC/web of the 90s. The shift is in the access
pattern, not the access paradigm. Napster/Kazaa/BitTorrent is an example of
the pendulum swinging. The Web was originally envisioned as an open access
community, but we have yet to move it beyond the client-server (centralized)
paradigm. Home servers preserve this paradigm. Many of us here run home
servers because we're geeks, but that doesn't apply to most people on
Facebook. Look at Diaspora: great idea (wrest control of our data from
Facebook), but still the centralized (seed/server) paradigm.

Distributed computing at the level we want is still WAY too hard for the end
user. The goal should be to make it as simple as using Facebook today, but
retaining control in a much better way than Facebook or Google let us do now.

~~~
joebadmo
I agree with you, and my great hope is that there is (or will be) enough of a
market opportunity for someone to exploit. The market would be for a
productized distributed cloud solution that's simple to set up and maintain.

The target demographic would be people who are concerned enough about privacy,
ownership of online identity, and government access to corporate cloud data to
pay for a self-operated solution.

The prerequisites for this to be viable as I see it are: cheap enough
hardware; cheap enough full-access pipes; enough demand; good enough UX. The
first two seem fairly obviously on the right path. The third I'm not sure, and
the fourth is under the control of the vendor.

[Edit: Maybe wide publicization of stuff like this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3036157> will help with the demand? Hey,
a guy can hope, right?]

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DanTheDuck
From my point of view, full-access pipes are the problem. Asymmetric
connections, bandwidth caps, incoming port filtering, etc are all de rigueur
for large fixed line ISPs these days. This is especially true in North
America. The mobile connectivity picture here is even worse.

Demand can be generated, if you do it correctly. The hardware is less of a
challenge if you do the distributed computing on several layers at once. Apple
has shown us the way on UI/UX, as has science fiction literature for decades
now.

We'll never get completely away from client-server (especially with mobile
computing), and that needs to be part of the design. But we have seen the
power of peer to peer networks, and even some kind of proxy network between
the p2p base and mobile clients could be done in a non-evil way.

~~~
wmf
Cheap hardware and cheap bandwidth are easy to get... in datacenters. And if
you have reasonable scale you can amortize away the cost of high availability,
too. The cloud isn't the problem here, it's SaaS. If you have a personal cloud
server, you can not upgrade all you want.

~~~
joebadmo
That's an interesting angle that I don't know enough about. For example, do
the laws governing SaaS data provision to law enforcement also apply to data
centers? If they do, then you're giving up some privacy from the gov't for the
convenience of outsourcing server management.

I guess what's interesting about your idea is that it presents control as a
continuum as opposed to a binary. There are varying degrees of
control/convenience possible, but most of the current options are heavily
weighted away from user control.

Also, I don't think this thread is really about the cheese-moving/silent-
upgrade phenomenon so much as data and identity ownership.

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domador
Like the article's author, I'm very wary of "parental computing". This is one
reason why I'm a greater fan of desktop OSs and apps over cloud apps (when a
reasonably-good desktop alternative is available). If I don't like the latest
"upgrade" to a desktop app, I can typically keep using my current version
without being forced to upgrade. If others are similarly displeased and there
are enough of us, we can sometimes get a company to recognize its misstep and
make amends (e.g. Windows Vista). Unfortunately, the freedom afforded by
desktops is being eroded as Windows and Mac OS become more tightly-controlled
platforms, with less freedom for end users to install (or keep using) whatever
software they want. (Unfortunately, I might have to seriously consider
migrating to a Linux-based GUI in the near future.)

Being a laggard can be difficult at times, but for me the user interface and
experience are supremely important. (Software companies' widespread ineptitude
with their UI/UX "upgrades" is hard for me to stomach.)

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sehugg
We used to also build our own computers and amateur radio sets. Now we buy
them. Are we losing anything? Probably. Have we gained anything? Probably.
Does this article ask a lot of rhetorical questions? Yes.

~~~
seunghomattyang
I agree. To extend the metaphor of the article a little more, we stop worrying
about our moms cleaning our rooms when we move out, buy our own furnitures and
pay our own rent. The web equivalent would be setting up/coding your own cloud
server and paying for the servers.

I don't think that's a realistic proposition for many. I wonder what the
author think is the ideal web. Is it where everything stays static? Look at
the v1 of Twitter or Facebook. They have changed dramatically since then but I
believe they changed for the better.

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RexRollman
I, too, have felt the irritation of seeing a service that worked exactly the
way I liked it changed. It can be annoying but I don't see any way to escape
this, aside from writing your own web apps.

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saturdaysaint
In the era when users had to pay $50 and install software upgrades, these
kinds of interface changes and feature additions were viewed as greedy
"planned obsolescence". But now that web apps are updated seamlessly and
without cost (and often with painstaking user education), developers are
somehow exerting control over end-users. I guess the pundit class needs to
justify their existence somehow.

~~~
cbs
>I guess the pundit class needs to justify their existence somehow.

You're blindly defending the one you like by refusing to see the larger
picture.

You're conflicting two very different issues. The changes in location of
control don't necessarily tie to the changes in price or upgradeability.

I use web "apps" that I pay for, some of them even require a large purchase
for major-version upgrades. I use free, automatically self-updating desktop
software. Free user-initiated update desktop software and everything in
between.

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k33n
Amazon isn't in the habit of moving my files around, or even changing their
API's. It's also far from rent-free. I enjoy having "my mom" clean my room. It
means I don't have to run my own IT infrastructure in a company of 4 with
barely any cashflow. One click... deploy to the world's most advanced Web
infrastructures (EngineYard, Heroku, Amazon, Etc) and for relatively little
cost.

~~~
DanTheDuck
The original article is much more about end-user SaaS type cloud experiences
than the IaaS or PaaS services you're mentioning. The nature of SaaS is that
it is directly facing the end-user. IaaS or PaaS services are more B2B style
and so the customer and the end-user are not the same.

The different nature of the SaaS beast doesn't mean that IaaS or PaaS systems
are any less vulnerable to things going wrong (see the EBS outage earlier this
year). But Iaas and PaaS providers are more vulnerable to customer loss if
APIs change (due to the instantaneous breakage) than SaaS providers are if UIs
change.

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zerostar07
Client-server model, welcome to the 2010s. Why do we call it cloud anyway?
Screw personal computers and thousands of hours wasted on removing malware,
give me more powerful browsers

p.s. i had the same stereo system as the one in the picture in the 90s, sigh

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sachinag
I'm glad to see this here, but if you're going to submit your own stuff - even
if you're a big shot writer for The Motherfucking Atlantic - I think it's not
too much to ask that you engage with us in the comments. Dan Frommer, Fred
Wilson, and others do it, and I think it'd be a nice social norm around here.

