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Keep Your Head in the Cloud
By Marc Tracy
We're cuckoo for cloud computing, as you can see here. We see it as a way for small businesses to bring overhead costs way down, make telecommuting and working from disparate locations much easier, improve security, and generally make life easier. (It also, according to McKinsey & Co., provides an important advantage over big corporations, for whom cloud computing's benefits are less stark.)
But our advocacy nonetheless obliges us to present the opposing view. Fortune presents something of the small-business case against cloud computing today, and it isn't uncompelling (though we do think they misread the McKinsey study, which found that cloud computing is overhyped only so far as large businesses are concerned).
The article argues:
-Cloud computing isn't as technologically simple and easy-to-use as its boosters make it out to be.
-That in addition it presents "deeper cultural challenges" for offices and workers used to desktop-based computing.
-It's much more expensive than you'd think just by noting the cheap basic fees, plus free applications like Google's.
-Finally, even as cloud computing costs mount as the applications can accomplish ever more, traditional desktop-bound applications--some especially designed for small businesses, and priced accordingly--are getting cheaper.
We're still going to stick with our advocacy. As anyone who has dealt with Microsoft's dominant business software suite (or even their dominant personal-computing software suite) knows, technology is always going to present some problems. Price-wise, cloud computing may not be as cheap as some may imply, but nor is it particularly expensive.
And as for ingrained anti-cloud computing cultures? Well, we'd respond that overthrowing ingrained cultures in the name of efficiency is pretty much the definition of the small-business advantage. It'd be a shame if that went to waste.
Comments (0)May 4, 2009 3:11 PM
