Microsoft Business Productivity Online

Let's take a careful look at the cloud troubles of late. I know a lot of my readers associate me with skepticism regarding the viability of cloud computing. As a matter of fact, I have never thought the cloud and the idea of cloud computing was not viable. I think it's risky, unreliable, and dumb for many uses. Let's review.

So I say it's risky because of users' over-reliance and failure to adequately back up everything and failure to have a back-up strategy. For instance, let's look at two of the cloud services that I use: MailChimp and LinkedIn. I have a database of contacts on each system, and I back them up on and off. This doesn't do me much good with LinkedIn, except to keep track of names, since it is a business networking scheme that cannot be duplicated off-site or locally. Nevertheless with Mail Chimp, I can export the names to another similar system if need be.

The dumb reason I dislike cloud computing

Then taking everything into account there is the "dumb" reason I dislike cloud computing. Woody Leonard wrote an interesting article about the outages of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. This soft of situation exemplifies dumb, along with the other attempts by Microsoft to move its regular Office Suite to something in the cloud that users can subscribe to. If something can be done locally, at the time it's dumb to put it in the cloud. It's dumb for the two reasons cited above: it's risky and unreliable. Plus, it's dumb because it adds a layer of complexity to something that should be simple.