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

Hard to say that we don't really.

[HatchedEggs]

Sure we mistrust the internet. Why wouldn't we? Most of us have had broadband providers with poor service, or just good old fashioned blips in our ability to connect. It is hard enough as is to get what we need done on the local services we run on our computers today... running them from the internet when there are so many potential problems is sure to be a bit scary.

I know that in many ways it is the future to move applications to the net. One that I respect a ton is salesforce.com, thats an amazing product.

But still, I think that most people are skeptical, like myself, about the viability of it currently.

Some things we do on our computers are extremely important... and the thought of adding in another variable can be disturbing. It will be interesting to see how these things are deployed and how succesful they are in the near future.

Hrmmm, even my blog has crashed on me a time or two.

Re:Internet companies as Utilities?

[needacoolnickname]

When Google going down disrupts my ability to get the police, firemen, or ambulance to my place in an emergency then I will worry why they are not responsible to the government.

Until then... I have other things I would prefer the government worry about.