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.