What’s Hindering Cloud Adoption? Try Humans.

I don't buy this article. Nothing is "hindering" cloud adoption, per se; the question is, <i>what problem does cloud adoption solve?</i> For me, the answer is "relatively few:" I have Mail.app for e-mail, Word / Mellel for word processing, NetNewsWire for RSS feeds, Textmate for text editing / blog posts, and so on. None of these will be particularly improved by cloud computing.<p>But some of them will be harmed by cloud computing: I don't want to have to have Internet access to access my files; I don't want other people to have access to my files; I don't want to have to learn a whole new set of tools that aren't improvements on my old set of tools.<p>In short, the benefits outweigh the costs. When/if the benefits exceed the cost, I'll start using the "cloud" more. The advocates of "cloud" computing aren't empathizing with their users.<p>Personally, I imagine that we're heading more towards a place where we have more Dropbox-style local / network integration.

Reading that it seemed as if OM considers it a given that cloud computing is automatically "better" and squishy humans are just getting in the way of progress.<p>Cloud computing is in many ways more efficient, but that's really not the only metric that matters, is it?<p>There is value in independence, privacy and security - none of which cloud computing can ever really compete on. There are also many applications where proximity of data or proximity of processing matters, and the cloud can't touch those either.<p>So much hype...

There's also cost. At certain scales (such as Grooveshark's scale) it can be significantly cheaper to do infrastructure in-house. Try negotiating bandwidth prices with Amazon.

What's hindering adoption of my product? Customers!