Cloud Free Sky

I was reading an article in Scientific American that discussed the economics of running ad-supported cloud services.

It brought about the realization that that the reason why all cloud services don't stick around, even though people love them. Cloud services need to make money to survive. The ones that don't make it either don't supply good data for targeted advertizing, or they don't attract enough eyeballs to get ad revenue, or refuse to charge a fee for some reason.

So, ask yourself: does my favorite cloud service give a company a rich, solid feed of information about myself? Is it useful as a large scale advertizing tool? Where does it get it's money?

If you can't answer that question, pull your data and run.


We can apply that model explain a lot of things: the death of mashups (no revenue is gained by providing content for other companies mashups), and the subsequent lockdown of Facebook and Twitter APIs. It's the writ reason for the shutdown of Tinkercad. Reader, especially in it's neutered social-free form, could only give vague information about favorite sites, and by design obscured the important information from stakeholders. The death of the many subscription/DRM music services also follows the trend.

This theory would also suggest that the personal computing device is not in particular danger of death, as there are many areas of computing that will strongly resist the cloud model of monetization. Shareware developers rejoice.

Cloud Seeding Disaster

It has not been a big secret that I do not hold cloud computing in high regard. In principle, the idea that we can centralize our content (you know, files) and processing (you know, the thing that $1000 computers do) is nifty. Everything from any device.

The downside is that the user doesn't have control over what happens in the cloud. You can hang on to a software install CD or a downloaded file forever and keep using it long after the company that made it has gone under (Hypercard and SuperPaint, for example), but once a cloud service stops working, it's gone. I've watched as a long sequence of cloud computing products has bit the dust, leaving people who paid or depended on them holding the bag. Flickr, Google Wave, Google Notebook, Zune Store, and more recently Cisco Routers, Razr Mice,  Simcity, Evernote, and the unending Adobe Creative Cloud debacle. I have ample evidence that engaging in cloud based activities is setting oneself up for a screwjob.

Thus, I've always used cloud stuff sparingly, but it creeps in around the edges. Blogger has a nice interface, games on Steam are fun, not needing a cable to put books on the Kindle is neat.

But then it happened.

They shutdown something I used all the time, really liked, and used to do my job better.

They shutdown Google Reader.

Um. Hey. Yeah. Hi. I was using that.

Unlike a lot of other stuff that's being hawked online these days, that product made me a more effective individual. Reader is/was like the one tool I found that was great for keeping up with scientific literature. Fast, clean, and flexible. I could sit down for a couple of hours one day a week and cram everything that I cared about into my head and/or my print queue. It was the tool it worked perfectly. I would have paid money for the privilege of using it. I told everyone I knew how awesome it was. I used it all the time. If you need to follow a lot of different information sources, it is the best tool around.

Now some pointy haired sand packer in California decided that no one is using it, and so throws the switch with no point of discussion or negotiation.

Put that on the pile of cloud failures, and a facsimile on the pile great-products-discontinued-for-no-reason.

I should have seen that coming.

Now what to do?