The BBC's Bill Thompson is good at puncturing hype, usually in a measured, thorough and well written way. His Storm warning for cloud computing is no exception. Micro-abstract:
"Cloud computing brings with it storm warnings
The physical location of our online services still matter a great deal."
A predictable analysis and not particularly novel. It is strange that someone familiar with developments in technology would not trust ingenuity to overcome these problems (which will emerge). Not being particularly ingenious, I'll suggest these off the top of my head: (i) Google gears allows local copies of all your documentation and local editing when disconnected from the Internet (ii) Google will allow you to choose the physical location of all your data in the future. Now those readers who have thought more about this will no doubt come up with more ingenious solutions, and in the meantime those of us who do not mind sharing our ideas and work will continue to reap the obvious benefits of the new clouds.
Posted by: Brian Mulligan | 01/06/2008 at 17:57