Re: Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Nathan Andelin wrote:

Just out of curiosity, is there anyone out there that didn't
already know this?

I had mixed feelings about the article. I've know people who would sooner trust Google than their employer's email, or that of their ISP. And would sooner trust Google applications over applications offerred by their employer.

Nathan:

Hmmm... that makes me think I should've been more explicit. I'm pretty sure that there are a bunch of 'end user' ideas about this, but I was thinking more from computing professionals who are subscribers here. The audience that _seemed_ to be targeted by the article (under the Technology > Computing category) would be more professionals than usual end-users.

I use gmail as well as a number of other 3rd-party providers for e-mail. But those are personal e-mail accounts. I wouldn't use them to send company e-mails.

I can't imagine my employer deciding to allow company e-mail to be dependent on some detached 3rd-party for the server software, the hosting of the physical servers and related elements. (Many other companies, I'm sure, have no major concerns.) OTOH, I could easily imagine a vendor of e-mail server software that we would install on some number of our own servers in various geographic locations within our own network -- creating our own 'cloud' kind of redundancy of service.

That would all be especially true of any 'proprietary' 3rd-party clouds.

Even personally, I only use gmail as an address that forwards to other addresses where I can use less proprietary clients, e.g., Thunderbird, to do all the actual stuff I want to do. It's fine for me to have a gmail account (or two) that helps with archiving a lot of my stuff. I still keep copies on one of my systems at home, and I only rarely actually use gmail directly -- perhaps as often as once every three months.

But for business...?

Tom Liotta