Take away the cloud, and most of our modern technology gurus are selling artisan burgers out the side of an NYC food truck.
So I appreciate the chutzpah necessary for technology analyst and Forbes contributor Roger Kay's systematic take-down of "Google's ideal" cloud-based universe.
Who are we kidding, you're not going to click that link. So allow me to summarize his points:
1. The cloud still can't handle big files (>1GB) efficiently.
2. Unless you live in Silicon Valley or South Korea, your network will fail you.
3. The more operations you conduct in the cloud, the greater your "attack surface."
(In the service of that last point, Kay includes an anecdote about traveling to Shanghai, shutting off all of the network functionality on his iPhone, and still getting remotely hacked by a China Mobile subscriber.)
I like this article because it dares to confront a fairly pervasive tech industry bias. Inside the bubble, we sometimes forget that not everyone in the world is entirely sold yet on cloud computing (or in the case of West Virginia, computing).
But by identifying the specific pain points, we can help non-techies better understand the pros and cons of cloud adoption.