Opinion: Get off of my cloud

Excuse me if I choke on the smoke and get blinded by the mirrors. Not wanting to put down any serious effort to improve the way all things computer-based work, but frankly, we’ve been here before. Several times.

His Googleness wants to free us from the shackles of the industry monopolist who is holding us to ransom with bloated software, which costs too much and doesn’t do what we want. OK, no secrets, he’s talking about Microsoft. Well this correspondent was around in the 1980s when a spotty geek and his mates in Redmond offered us a brave new world of computing. They promised to free us from the clutches of the industry monopolist who was holding us to ransom with bloated software, which cost too much and didn’t do what we want.

OK, no secrets there either, they were talking about IBM and the rest of the mainframe gang. The mini-computer mavens, most of all now long deceased or gobbled up by the micro-computer mavericks, were seen as relatively benign allies in the war against the oppressors of democratic computing. It was those rotten mainframers who were ruining things, said the previously unknown upstarts at Microsoft. And did we believe them? Oh yes, we believed brothers and sisters! Hallelujah! Behold the light shining through the Windows!

But like all cults, we ended up sending the leader all our money to provide him with all the Rolls Royce’s he needed to secure our freedom from the oppressive computer clowns. And then, when he had all our money and we had only the one true religion, we realised he wasn’t God after all and his software wasn’t made in heaven. It had bugs. Just like that other stuff we ditched. It grew ever more obese just like us, while offering not much more than was promised in the first place, but never delivered. We sent what money we had left to the hardware gods at Intel to try and make the heaven-sent software hum a little faster.

And then we lost our faith. We started looking for a new messiah, one who would guarantee our blessed salvation from the oppressive overlords who had taken control of our very lives, for now, we equate our very well-being with the power of our computers to organise our daily digital dalliance. Yes, yes, on the sidelines was another minor cult, which worshipped a piece of fruit with a byte taken out of it. But they never managed to replace the main religion even after the Vista was widened enough for us to see the false promises fading in the Windows for what they were really worth.

So we searched and searched and searched for a new way forward. And then we Googled and Googled and Googled until there was no other way to search for truth and meaning. And, surprisingly the Googletron revealed that the answer was indeed staring us in the face all along. But the answer wasn’t the Oracle, it was the Google. Up there, in the clouds, where we always knew we should look for salvation. Call me when the next guru hits town, if you haven’t already sent all your money to Eric and his high-priests of search engine optimisation.

cloud computing software