Cloudy Thinking

Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain has a column in today's New York Times warning of the "real dangers" of cloud computing. But they aren't "real dangers," at least, not dangers specific to cloud computing. Like many innovation naysayers, he identifies dangers in new systems without acknowledging that most of them already exist in current systems, and gives too much credit to the current systems while unfairly criticizing the new ones.

Citing the announcement of Google's Chrome operating system, and the news about Amazon deleting books from users' Kindles without their permission, he warns that:

Someone hosting your data can stop hosting it or take it away.

This is a valid concern; it's one reason I've never had any interest in "rental" music services like Rhapsody. That said, it is the height of foolishness to keep important data in any single place, cloud or no, without backing it up. So yes, Google could theoretically shut down its Documents service tomorrow, and I'd lose access to anything I hadn't backed up. The same is true, and always has been, of a hard-drive crash, which is much more likely.

Data hosted in the cloud have less privacy.

Duh. You always make tradeoffs between access and security. Should I turn on "Back to My Mac" or shut network access down to outsiders? Am I OK banking online? Should I live with slower performance on my laptop so I can encrypt everything on it?

The government can spy on your online data.

It can spy on your offline data too, unless you never send any of it through an unencrypted network connection.

Hackers can steal your data.

Google's platform is a heck of a lot safer from Hacker's than Microsoft's desktop applications. Not that the cloud is totally secure. Zittrain mentions the recent Twitter mess, where hackers obtained access to confidential corporate data stored in Google Apps. The hacker did so by exploiting some basic human weaknesses that are as easy to find in desktop applications as in cloud applications. And the Twitter server admins who used "password" as a password on servers would have endangered their company no matter where or how its systems were hosted.

It inhibits innovation.

This one is a puzzler. His point is that Apple controls software for the iPhone in a way that Microsoft could never dream of. Even if this were true, how meaningful is it? First of all, the iPhone is not a cloud platform, and second of all, there are many cloud platforms (including Amazon's, which he cites in the article) that exercise no control over content whatsoever.

In any case, the cloud is no worse for innovation than traditional platforms. He says, "Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice or Firefox." Nonsense. Last I looked, IE is a deeply inferior browser, slower and less secure than Firefox, yet it is still the dominant browser. Microsoft Office is a horrible program; its latest version has a UI so bizzare that no one I know has really figured it out. But its ubiquity forces you to deal with it.

Innovation in the cloud is a lot easier. You don't have to convince users to install applications on their desktops and keep up with your updates. You can plug into platforms they're already using (Google, Facebook, etc). Your application works easily on multiple platforms. You can reuse existing infrastructure.

And sure, Facebook could ban your application, but the software landscape is littered with the corpses of companies whose excellent software was destroyed by Microsoft's bundling or blocking techniques in Windows. If your Facebook application is blocked, you can use the cloud to talk about it and make it available elsewhere, and Facebook users can make their views known whether or not the service wants them to.

Overall, Zittrain seems to be worrying that we're heading towards "a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code." This is worse than the Apple/Microsoft dichotomy of user-unfriendly arrogance and control? Please. The cloud has challenges and dangers, and provides opportunities and possibilities, just like any other computing environment. There's no need to get hysterical about it.