Getting Addicted to Gmail? Chances Are Google Will Charge You Once

There’s a very thought-provoking article in the Guardian today about the dangers of cloud computing that resulted in quite an animated discussion in the blogosphere making people forget the tech companies stock valuations for a moment and try to figure out if we are really locking ourselves up in a trap of the much-hyped cloud computing.

True, cloud computing is obviously one of the most hyped terms these days and everyone thinks it is kind of hip and cool to rely on web applications that will take as much of your digital life as possible to the clouds from your own desktop – and keep it in the cloud.

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the GNU free operating system, thinks that there is a big danger in cloud computing as we are losing control to the companies offering such solutions instead of keeping it to ourselves. And eventually those companies will decide what to do with us: for one, they could start charging for the applications and the tools we are getting addicted to partly because they are free will be growing more and more expensive to us with time.

The most dangerous scenario we can imagine is that some company could decide to lock us out of our own files (or simply lost them out of reasons it does not even control – no matter which we consider to be worse). But while such a scenario sounds too bad to ever be willfully implemented by any company that wants to stay on the market and maintain a decent brand image, chances are they could still do something harmless like adding a price tag to what we now deem to be completely free. And while it is not particularly dangerous and we will hopefully be able to migrate before we are forced to pay for what we don’t want to pay for (or choose to pay if those are the tools useful enough to justify the price), this scenario sounds like a perfectly possible one to me.

We have grown accustomed to believing that the vast majority of web-based applications we rely heavily on both for our work and entertainment are free and will remain free but we forget one thing – the majority of them are proprietary applications actually owned by some companies and those companies will decide what to do with these applications. Chances are they won’t be interested in knowing your opinion once they decide to start charging you for what you have used for years now for free.

Those users that tend to diversify their handling of information relying on both web-based applications and storage for some things yet keeping a backup copy of information on their own desktops at least for safety reasons, will probably be least hurt by arbitrary behavior of owners of those applications users can’t control. These users will have a backup copy and will be able to migrate somewhere else to a place they can control – most probably a desktop version of the same application. But of course the radical option of keeping everything you can to yourself does not sound particularly realistic either.

So while I’d really prefer not to have to say anything like this, reasoning behind such a criticism of cloud computing sounds like a solid one. Yes, we are all excited about various opportunities web 2.0 provides us with and we eagerly start uploading our photos to Flickr (Yahoo servers) or Picasa (Google servers), our emails are handled by Gmail or Yahoo! Mail with many of us never even bothering to use the POP functionality to pull the emails to a desktop client, our documents (often containing private information) are also uploaded to either Google Docs or Microsoft servers to use Office Live Workspace.

But while these activities seem to be intended to make our work more convenient by giving us access to all our information anywhere we may need it, we somehow don’t think of the consequences when any of the companies (or all of them) decide to change their pricing politics and finally earn a revenue off their web-based application same as traditional software vendors do now. I don’t want to support any conspiracy theories myself but I think it will not hurt to reconsider your current information handling to at least keep some control over what you do and where.
Image by Amir Rowaichi used under Creative Commons.