Mistrust of Today's Technology

narramissic writes to tell us that Sean McGrath has an interesting look at a general mistrust of today's technology and draws a comparison to the proofreading of photocopies. From the article: "The constant availability of web services out there in the cloud is one such idea. Today, we do not trust the cloud and the services on it to be always available. Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline but we still do not trust them to be always there and available. I predict that this day will pass. The day will come when outages of big commercial services on the cloud are as unusual as outages in the phone system or the electricity supply system. Sure, losing power will also lose you the services on the cloud but your business most likely has bigger problems to worry about when the power goes."

Comments

Beta

[generic-man]

Considering how many useful services in "the cloud" currently bear "beta" tags, I think it's a pretty easy to argument to make that reliability will improve. Google's own search engine was "beta" the first time I used it 7-8 years ago.

Of course, by the time Gmail is out of beta we'll all be salivating over ZMvnxjowi (pronounced "Leonard") mail, and the cycle will begin anew.

reliable technology

[rpax9000]

I used to live someplace where the power was very unreliable (by U.S. standards) in that it was not uncommon to have one or two power outages per month that lasted from several hours to a day or two. It was out in the middle of nowhere (which means an electric pump to get wellwater, so no crummy tasting sulfur water during the power outages, either). To this day, even though I live someplace where the power has gone out once in the last three years (the northeast blackout a couple years back), I don't trust electricity to always be on and usually have enough contingency plans to get by for a day or two (candles, water (even though I have city water now, go figure), ups on the computer, etc...) and my wife (who grew up places without power outage problems) thinks I am a bit nuts. My parents (who grew up in even more remote areas than where I did and were both born in houses without indoor plumbing) think that I take elctricity for granted. My grandparents who grew up in an even more remote area did not have electricity as kids and do not understand why people panic when the power goes out.... It's all what you are used to.

When you expect people to trust the unseen middleware which runs a frighteningly high percentage of their lives (both at home and work), you have to remember most of them have no idea how it works and have enough experience with today's crappy OS of choice that they don't see computers as reliable. In 20 or 30 years, some of us will wonder how on earth our kids trust a computer with a Microsoft core to drive their cars for them while they watch movies over their wireless broadband dashboard videoscreens. They will trust it because they are used to computers that are reliable. Remember, we are only in the first 20-30 years of computer technology that is available for average people to directly interact with on a daily basis. How reliable was an electrical home appliance 100 years ago or a mass produced car 75 years ago? Think of how long it took us to fully trust these technologies (jokes about the quality of current American autos aside) and realize how early we are in the personal computer age (which is again the only way that most people experience "computer technology").