Wozniak Predicts Horrible Problems With the Cloud

Hugh Pickens writes "'I think it's going to be horrendous,' said Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak when asked about the shift away from hard disks towards uploading data into the cloud. The comment came in a post-performance dialogue with audience members after a performance in Washington of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, monologist Mike Daisey's controversial two-hour expose of Apple's labor conditions in China. 'I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.' The engineering wizard behind the progenitor of today's personal computer, the Apple II, expanded on what really worried him about the cloud. 'With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to. I want to feel that I own things,' Wozniak said. 'A lot of people feel, "Oh, everything is really on my computer," but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it.'"

Comments

Creator vs. Consumer

[Gothmolly]

Woz is a creator. So was Jobs. But they both needed Consumers - Jobs was more aware of that than Woz obviously.

Woz wants to build something, own it, and carry it around in his pocket. Most modern IT stuff is designed to give you a means to consume content.

Re:Creator vs. Consumer

[AmiMoJo]

User generated content has been a revolution. People get news and information from each other instead of central news agencies and big content providers. The whole attraction of things like Twitter and Facebook, and of course Slashdot, is the user generated content.

People are no longer consumers of content, they are creators. The shift now is that instead of creating on your PC and uploading you can create online directly. I have documents that I made entire in Google Docs, web pages and blog posts written entirely in a CMS, G+ posts that never touch my HDD. I back what I can up locally but a lot of people use them as their only storage medium, trusting that they will never go away or steal their work or otherwise abuse it. And as Woz says, no-one reads the T&Cs.

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[postbigbang]

At home:

- no one makes backups
- no one protects from coffee spills or burglaries, for that matter
- people lose their machines all the time
- download malware, and let cats sleep on their machines

At the Office, which if you're smart, will be the same practice as the cloud:

- Backups are rarely checked for integrity
- People spill coffee on their machines, and they get stolen
- Someone forgets to pay the Symantec tax, or doesn't look at the CVE and oops-- all gone!
- Nearly 100% of networks get cracked every few years

There isn't much difference, except that in the cloud a few people have training, which they may or may not use correctly.