It’s more than fashionable these days to debate the pros and cons of computing in the cloud (whatever that means – see my feeble recent attempt at clarity), but I’m growing ever more amused as I realize that even the greatest skeptics – myself among them – are making extensive use of it.
You see, cloud-based capabilities today run so smoothly and are so central to daily life that we often just take them for granted. Here’s how the joke’s been on me:
I’ve been using Xmarks for years. A free online service that keeps browser bookmarks in sync from one machine to another, it works really well, it runs invisibly in the background, and I’ve paid it virtually no attention at all.
Recently, though, the company announced it would suspend operations in a few months, and when I went looking for a comparable replacement, the best I could find was thru Google. “Oh no!” I thought. “Not the Google Cloud!” And then is suddenly struck me: Xmarks itself is a cloud-based service! I’ve been using it for longer than the term has been in vogue, so I never thought of it that way. (FYI: news came this morning that Xmarks has found a buyer, so no replacement will be necessary after all.)
And you know what? There’s more! My smartphone and desktop calendars are sync’d that way, too … as are my contacts … and I use emailing services and social media and email itself, for goodness sakes. And my medical group’s portal to keep track of appointments and test results. And Skype, to work my Internet Radio magic.
So much for my “not me, not ever!” reaction to using the cloud.
And so much for those others who feel the same way. We’re all in, like Flynn, whether we think we are or not. For better or for worse, it’s only a matter of time until our organizations get there too.
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