We've learned to live with centralized water and electricity and banking, all outside of our control, rather than rely on on-premises solutions. SaaS, too, will win out after a few hiccups.
In a very real sense our data is an extension of ourselves, a part of our minds. In contrast water, electricity, and banking are by-and-large anonymous basic services that have no further properties.
I get that cloud storage people think of themselves as the utility providers of the future, after all it makes instinctive sense to want to own something which consumers will spend their whole lives on. I've been in meetings where SaaS people gave presentations saying stuff like "...and in the near future the average person will spend 60% of their total income on cloud services; let's make that future happen!"
The difference is of course that after a power outage or after changing your utility providers, everything is back to normal - but after a little "cloud accident", all your stuff is simply gone. Worse, suppose in that glorious cloud future a person might end up in a situation where they can't make those substantial payments to their cloud providers for a time. All their stuff will be gone, as well. It turns out, we're being re-educated to accept a world where everything is just rented, not only including the stuff we "bought", but also the right to keep our very own creative output. Let the severity of that sink in for a minute.
We're drifting into a setting where basic properties of our digital lives are taken and then rented back to us at a horrendous markup.
Exactly and the analogy with the utilities is bad for another reason too.
It makes sense for the utilities to be centralized generating electricity for every house separately is inefficient and has only become recently viable with solar panels. Where possible people tend to switch to that for independence or a combination of both.
Getting water to every house in a city is impossible without it being centralized.
SAAS on the other hand is not necessary. We can do the same thing without requiring constant connectivity or by building and app that requires connectivity only when absolutely necessary for it to work.
However we can't ask for rent if it's not a service. I for one avoid all SAAS like the plague.
I don't mind one time payments hey if i get enough value from the product I wouldn't mind the option of donating extra however monthly payments make me look twice at how much value I'm getting or if i can get it from a product that requires a one time payment instead.
The only way to give people back control, while maintaining the benefits of 'the cloud', is to make it insanely simple for people to run their own infrastructure. I'm working on the building blocks to make this a reality.
> Worse, suppose in that glorious cloud future a person might end up in a situation where they can't make those substantial payments to their cloud providers for a time. All their stuff will be gone, as well.
There should be some sort of process for this, akin to safety deposit boxes. Image the machines to tape, store for a year or two. You may need to work in something to ensure you don't turn into long-term data storage (maybe only offer the download once, or add in a 30 day "thaw from storage" buffer, or maybe a fixed fee to retrieve that data).
I think GNU gets it right: SaaS would be more aptly termed Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS).[1] The Creative Suite used to work fine before they turned it into a cloud "service". There is no good reason to make software that runs as native binaries on two platforms (Mac and Windows) dependent on remote servers.
I don't know about you, but I happen to live in a place were those things are still mostly under government control, and we very, very rarely see blackouts of the kind that have hit eg parts of the US from time to time.
And I don't need banking 24/7 to do my job. I don't need water 24/7 to live, especially if an outage is made public in advance. I am (too) dependent on electricity -- but there are alternatives if I need them (eg: rent/buy a generator and gasoline -- probably not viable in a massive blackout, though. At any rate it is certainly easy to plan for (and not too expensive)).
So most of these fall squarely in the "viable alternative" or not-essential (24/7) category.
> I don't know about you, but I happen to live in a place were those things are still mostly under government control, and we very, very rarely see blackouts of the kind that have hit eg parts of the US from time to time.
That's just propaganda. I'm sure there's places where water and electricity are under government control and it still sucks, and i bet there's places where they aren't and everything works great.
And "I'm sure..." weakens your argument. Do you get the irony of saying the parent post is relying on propaganda while tacitly admitting you don't know whether what you're asserting is true?
Utilities and telcos are a weird industry, with issues of natural monopolies and last-mile issues. I don't know what the right way to handle them is, but the case against government intervention is much weaker.
I happen to live in a place where utilities are deregulated and people can choose from any number of competitors for their supplier, and US-style blackouts are literally completely unheard of.
Are you sure that the deregulation is not just empty word?
Yes, you can usually pick your own retailer for you utilities. But you cannot pick the distributor (downstream of the retailer, owns cables or pipes in your street) or transmission (upstream of the retailer, owns the cables or pipes providing your city).
The sales/distribution company usually doesn't own anything, they are just sales and marketing office. Everything is physically provided by companies, that you cannot choose.
No, but the sales balance on the National Grid is still based on competition, because it is regulated by the interaction of dozens of companies. The distributor has no control over who generates power, or how much is paid for it, and that is why there is no shortage [1].
With non-power utilities, even this isn't an issue - water or gas are never randomly shut off without warning.
[1] There is a small deficit of generation capacity under some conditions, primarily due to recent underinvestment in nuclear energy, so power is purchased from France routinely, who have a large surplus due to their much stronger generation infrastructure, but even if this became unavailable, the capacity is enough to prevent US-style grid failures.
Since I have a Nokia phone, which permits me to download maps for specific countries and regions, I'm not dependent on Google - (or any other on-line) maps.
I'd wager that Nokia provides equal, if not - arguably - better quality than Google maps and I don't need to incur insane roaming charges when using a map abroad.
Granted, there are a few functions, that require a net connection, but basic map functionality and navigation works very well without being on-line.
Maps are only one example. I can't think of many applications, which I would prefer as a "cloud" based service as opposed to native.
You know what Google Maps needs? Offline downloadable map functionality. They had that feature, then removed it, then put it back... now I honestly don't know where it's at.
Browsing offline maps is a breath of fresh air, it's so much quicker. Obviously you wouldn't download the whole world, only your home city or whatever. But it's lightning fast to zoom and pan around an offline map compared with connecting over mobile bandwidth.
Browsing maps in Airplane mode should be possible. It's a map after all, not a website.
Z=18 is rarely used, so for Z<=17 you're looking at roughly 300MB for raster tiles a city the size of Calgary. You also don't get routing information with purely raster data.
You could try vector data which would be smaller, but then you have to display it, which can be computationally expensive if you want it to look pretty, and you'd lose the snappiness you're seeking.
>Actually, you could fit the entirety of the state of Washington in <50% of my phone's storage. I'm not seeing a problem.
Well, most people don't want to lose even 20% of their phone's storage in a single app, much less 50%.
And that's just for those satisfied to only have info for one state. What about people regularly travelling between 1-2 states?
That said, I question the OP storage math. At least with vector information, I know that something like Navigon's GPS/map app, can store the whole of US (including the smallest of towns and cities) in around 1GB.
Vector data has a much smaller footprint in most cases, but takes lots of processing to render, and even more if you need to be able to zoom around the map. Rendering the US down to z17 as raster tiles allows for efficient processing, but could easily get into 10s of GB (which makes sense, since it is creating thousands and thousands of png images). The size grows exponentially with each zoom level though, so if you only need something like z12, you might be able get it into the 10s of MB range.
I wasn't saying I would want the entirety of Washington on my phone. Quite the contrary. I was pointing out the sheer area that fits in that amount of storage. It's 71,362 square miles.
If you're traveling regularly between two states, you'd want your origin city, destination city, and your route with maybe a couple miles on either side. Say a 250-mile route, and 200 square miles at either end. I bet it fits in <2GB.
Just discovered google maps on my ipad only lets you save an offline map if youre logged in. Nice job Google, you've managed to make signing in to google a requirement even for offline functionality.
But you can't search the resulting map or get directions. I have an Android phone, and the last good Maps for it was version 6. I do two things: (1) use copilot GPS with the whole U.S. and Canada (takes 1.8 GB); (2) keep my old Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.2 which cannot be upgraded and has Maps 6.
Off the top of my head, GMail is the only one. Mostly because Outlook's/Thunderbird's UI and UX are absolute ass.
SAAS is inferior in:
* games
* text editors
* photo editors
* IDEs
Backup storage is okay, but I live in a country with tight bandwidth caps so I can't really use things, plus I don't want Google or Dropbox or MeGa snooping at what I upload.
So I would never pay to use any of the above things, and I would certainly NEVER pay Adobe for anything. I'm fortunate that I don't need to use their products.
Isn't steam like this? The bits get downloaded to your machine, but if Steam goes offline your SOL.
What steam could use is better download management. If they moved over to an on-demand streaming architecture it'd be really huge. The days you'd need to preload software could be over. This sort of thing has been solved many times before, so it's technically possible. In fact, as I type this I wonder why they haven't done it already.
I think it would be a good thing because if I have a hankering to play a game I don't have installed, I wouldn't need to wait for an hour for it to download.
I need to worry about ISPs and bandwidth before, it's just that now I can be more frivolous with what I have installed on my machine (no sense leaving something installed "just in case").
My self-hosted apps work on my laptop when I have no network connectivity. That's a big win for me.
Funny you mention Mappoint. It's exactly what I use when I'm navigating for my wife on trips. It works fine in areas with poor wireless data coverage. (We supplement with Waze to get traffic reports, but "self-hosted" Mappoint guarantees we won't lose map coverage because of radio issues.)
You've perhaps never been in the "damn, where am I...... Bollocks no signal, I still don't know", situation and that was just 30 miles from home. I bought a gps with the maps loaded at the first opportunity.
"We've learned to live with centralized water and electricity and banking, all outside of our control, rather than rely on on-premises solutions."
Not necessarily true. I'd argue that banking is much less centralized (clearing behind the various banks you might choose from is, of course, but in the meanwhile I can get most of what I need done if their independent system is up), and I grew up on a property at the edge of my town of ~50K with only electricity and phone as centralized services. We were on our own for everything else, water from a well, sewage treatment with a septic tank, heating from a big propane tank, which can be filled by various vendors, although the systems behind them are centralized, but there's plenty of reserves so that short term outages aren't an issue, we even burned our trash....
A lot of us believe in having a greater degree of self-reliance, e.g. I do backups to disk and LTO tape (some tapes of which live in a safe deposit box), and use rsync.net, a very low level SaaS provider for further redundancy.
I'd never allow my livelihood to depend on 24x7 external services except for electricity (no electricity == no modern civilization, which would eventually kill me for medical reasons).
I don't completely agree with this. Many homes and probably even some business are on well water and/or septic systems. Backup electrical generators on-site are commonplace at offices. Lots of noise (but maybe less substance) is being made of bitcoin taking banking back into the individual's control.
