We’ve all seen the massive move to cloud and push my Microsoft to get us all there even more. What concerns me is the fact that the NSA has been saving every single thing we’ve been doing in the cloud for years already via its Prism Program, without our knowledge.
Once the internet giants have got us 100% online, what’s stopping them from pulling the plug on us unless we fork out ridiculous sums of money? There are thousands of companies all over the world apart from the billions of people all storing everything online. How do we protect ourselves if Microsoft, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Youtube and friends join forces against us?
Veronique – I like you, in fact I think you are awesome! I am honored to consider you a friend, but this is paranoid nonsense at best.
Big businesses have collective monopoly positions in almost every aspect of our lives and for sure they do sometimes use cartel mentality to engineer or inflate pricing. But you have to rememeber that commerce is, in the main, self-levelling.
The world is competitive. Pricing tends to be “much of a muchness” as we would say using the Queens English. If Microsoft charge $50 per seat per month for Dynamics CRM online then SalesForce charge $50 per seat per month +- a couple of dollars.
Pricing ebbs and flows but vendors have to charge what they know people can pay, there is no point charing $100 per seat per month for CRM in the Cloud as nobody would pay it.
Privacy is a delicate issue. From a purely personal perspective, I have nothing to hide so I sleep pretty well at night knowing that somebody out there is crunching data looking for patterns that may indicate terrorist or other forms of nefarious activity. I would rather sacrifice a little privacy in the trade off for security and safety.
We have to trust somebody somewhere, and I, for one, recognise that one of the trade-offs of the digital/Cloud age is that it makes it simpler for agencies (Government or otherwise) to vacuum up all the bits and bytes and take a peek now and then.
It’s sure easier than handwriting a letter and putting a stamp on it every time I want to send correspondence to somebody…
If you really want something to worry about, I have two words for you – Zombie Apocalypse
. .\Seb
