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 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.