Get Your Head Out Of The Clouds And Back To Reality

Welcome back, one and all, to TGM’s official article series by a guy that has no business talking about the topic, “Baseless Opinion”.

Over the past few months tech companies have been trying to get this whole idea of “The Cloud” and “Cloud Computing” into our heads.  The idea behind The Cloud is simple, taking your work from the offline world of a desktop or laptop and putting it online.  This is a great idea and has many uses in todays highly mobile society, but does it really need a whole new name?  The more I listen to many people in the tech community who speak of “The Cloud”, they bring up examples of things that have been around for over a decade.

GMail

Google’s online email service is referenced time and time again as an example of “Cloud Computing”.  While it is true that all of your mail data is stored on Google’s service, how is this any different than the email services of old?  Yahoo Mail has been doing this for much longer than Google.  The IMAP protocals for reading and viewing your mail without having to download all of the messages has also been around for far longer.

Online Storage

Last time I checked, the whole of the internet is based around online storage.  After all, how is one supposed to view a web page if the files are not on a remote computer?  I have been using FTP for as far back as I can remember having internet access.  Apple’s MobileMe, formerly (dot)Mac, uses a form of file transfer known as WebDAV for it’s online storage service.  This is nothing new.

Thin Client - Rich Server

This is where things get a bit fuzzy.  We are seeing programs that used to live on the desktop being turned into online services.  Google Docs being a prime example.  While the service is not as powerful and has many limits that a desktop application would have, it does what it does and does it well enough for the average user.

The problem with the whole idea of the “Thin Client - Rich Server” is that all of your data is stored on the server as opposed to the client, making offline access impossible in those times when you don’t have internet access, or worse, when you have highly insecure access.  Google Gears attempts to solve that by syncing up your data to your web browser whenever you access the service.  Google Gears has one flaw and that is that the developer of the online service has to implement Gears support, and as well all know, most companies tend to use their own secret sauce before using other peoples code.

The more I hear about “The Cloud” the more I wonder if this is not just the latest in buzz words in the tech industry.  Web 2.0 was the big catchphrase for sometime.  What was Web2.0?  Some said it was the whole social media design, but wasn’t Geocities doing personal websites long before MySpace and FaceBook?  Others said it is the interactive nature of websites using AJAX programming styles, but the internet is still a point-and-click experience no matter how many page-loads you save on with inline loading.  Even others said that it was the clean, rounded and smooth website designs that made Web2.0 what it is, although those art styles have been around in modern culture and art.

What we need right now is not another buzzword or catchphrase, but an acknowledgement of what we have known all along, that the internet is far more than what we perceive.