bjoernvold.com

I will again take the opportunity to state the obvious. Any company that makes itself dependent on a server (=Cloud) completely controlled by others is negligent.
This gets harder and harder to control though because there are so many wonderful applications offered that truly will make life easier. Often you dont even know that the products are depending on clouds.
So the Microsoft CRM (Customer Relation Management) and Office 365 are heavily marketed products depending on the "Cloud".

This is heavily marketed and very understandably so because once you have used those products for a while, Microsoft (in this case) has a great degree of control over your customer relations. Oh the power!

This is by no means Limited to Microsoft it is a common interest for any software producer to obtain the greatest possible level of control.
But Microsoft is newsworthy now because they have demonstrated my point nicely:


There you are as a business leader 2h before the meeting about the biggest contract for your company ever, and you cannot access your customer data

When you desperately try to fix it - pronto! - you are met with confusing write offs:

Tim Beljavskis (@pyrofenix) said that his company was experiencing CRM Online connectivity issues, even though Microsoft support said their servers were up and running. Around 1 PM EST, Beljavskis posted on Twitter that CRM 2011 was down.

Microsoft officials have said that Microsoft is planning to add CRM Online to the company’s hosted Office 365 suite — which currently includes Microsoft-hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Lync — before year-end.
Microsoft has not transitioned many of its existing BPOS customers to Office 365, advising them that they were going to begin that process in earnest in September. But the company has been selling new customers subscriptions to Office 365 since it launched in late June.

Yeah right that is what you want to hear in this situation:
Microsoft can probably fix it in September!

Then MS realizes that you are really p... about this and start investigating for real:

At approximately 11:30am PDT, Microsoft became aware of a networking issue affecting customers of some Microsoft services hosted out of one of our North American data centers. We worked to isolate the issue and we are beginning to see service restoration. We continue to investigate the root cause of this issue,” according to Steven Gerri, General Manager, Global Foundation Services.

All is good then: They are continuing to investigate....
May I suggest a translation for that?
They have no idea what is gong on - and what went wrong!
Meanwhile you are looking at this in your shiny new cloud software:


Good to know then that it is not MS's fault! It is that North American data center.
Have you noticed that those "North American Data Centers" (probably on Windows servers) are never a part of the marketing when you look at those webpages with all those fantastic features that will improve your business?
Well they are and they always will be.......

By the way you were so unprepared to that business meeting that you lost the contract!
Who is to blame?
On this point Microsoft and I agree:
You!

VMware partners with Dell, Linux in big cloud-computing push

Coincidentally, I was surprised to see the headline including Linux in my Oakland Tribune e-dition, this a.m.

Different OS, same issues. There are elements of the business model issue for Linux embedded in this story, I think. Pretty much like Larry Ellison, I have to think of "Cloud" = "Internet" but there might be gems of business to be found buried in the hoopla, for Linux or anybody, business is not my bailiwick.

So, from this relatively uninformed perspective, my first thought about the MS Cloud fiasco was "Why not have some physical copy of your data on your own machine(s)?"

Cloud Foundry can store programs in different data centers, as well as a customer's own facility, so there's a backup in case of an outage.

Of course, that leads to something like "Of what use the Cloud?" Good luck!



Brought to you by "Teh Cloud"

You have got it! (Love that smiley! I must implement it here).

There is no surprise to me that Ubuntu is going for the cloud. They are in Linux to make money and control is money. Drifting the "cloud" will not be for free even if the software is. Or at least not the professional superduper solution - it will cost money.
Clearly that is an area where Linux can make money - because drifting servers is what Linux can do the best.

That does not change the fact that you are trusting your nude photos with your neighbors wife, to total strangers. Even if the cloud only serves as a backup - I would hesitate to give "it" that.

And what about governmental instructions a la Wikileaks? If you have trusted your payments to a credit card company the Government can simply decide that they are not to give you the (your) money.
I am sure they can do that with data too. So if you use the cloud to spread information about why you think the US governmental surveillance of the UN is plain wrong - you could already be in trouble.

I've got not much to lose, no nude wife photos, so casual cloud usage, ala Dropbox et al seems about right. Exposure of basic freedoms to {governmental|corporate} control is more disquieting, albeit seemingly inevitable, one way or the other.

"It takes money to make money" is what comes to mind wrt Ubuntu, FTW!

I see good and bad. Good that, theoretically, Linux gets more exposure and legitimacy. Bad that the "roots" of Linux in intertubes and pure creativity get lost, co-opted, as so many things that are "hip", at the beginning.

The spirit of software freedom is the more important thing, to me, but not to the capital-driven world, I am afraid. I can only hope that the spirit does not die.

I think (and hope) it will survive. Simply because it is good business too. Canonical cannot iron out all bugs and develop all by themselves, without paying a load of money.
The contribution of people with that spirit is worth billions.