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Will Google give a black eye to “all” cloud based providers?

It’s not everyday that Google has a major outage that makes the news but I ‘m quite confident that they have small outages everyday that effect a small populous. In terms of search, if the entire result set is not returned no one could tell. There is however a game changer in the works, applications via the cloud – cloud based computing, where now every glitch is magnified. Every outage no matter how minor is magnified by the inability of the provider in this case Google to deliver an application to the consumer.

Google’s failures in the delivery of an application affect every provider of hosted services, they are not alone, and the failure transcends the industry. The very thought of failure plants seeds in the minds of decision makers that negatively affect the adoption of hosted services, whether that be software as a service or hosted desktops. Google isn’t the only big player to have outages, Amazon’s AWS service has also experienced outages that, at the time, probably had a greater overall impact but the impact did not directly touch the consumer. One saving grace for Amazon was the “beta” tag in its product offering.

Due simply to their presence and popularity Google is the poster child for delivery success and failure of services as they try to deliver applications for email, word processing, spreadsheet and other to follow without fail. I’m not advocating that if Google fails to deliver applications consistently it marks the end of hosted services; it just makes it more difficult to sell to the end user, the trend to hosted services continues.

It is with every leap of technology that we face these hurdles, take the cell phone for instance. It wasn’t that long ago that dropped calls were the norm and the cost for a call between the driveway and the house costs you a buck. Over the years service levels have increased and dropped calls in most major cities a rare occurrence. Adoption of cloud based services is at the developmental equivalent of the dropped cell phone call. In time service will improve and acceptance of the new methods will be the norm.

Google won’t single handedly destroy the adoption of new hosted technologies with occasional outages but they will lend credence to managements cautious approach.

Coming of age in a digital way

Something old is something new

Something borrowed and something blue, not quite but something’s have just been around for ever and we just take them for granted. It seems that everyone in all parts of business are talking about virtualization in terms of servers and desktops. The new “Holy Grail” it appears has just been discovered and we’re all beating down the door to get to it. The problem for most is that they weren’t even wet behind the ears when we shed our first rendition of the terminal and now they think they’ve discovered something new. If we can learn from history we are on the verge of finally getting things right.

Somewhere between the old terminal with the cute little green letters or orange, if you were lucky, and the near future we in business simply lost our minds. Don’t get me wrong technology has improved our output tremendously in the last 30 or so years and I have all the faith that it will continue to drive society to greater heights. But when the personal computer started to invade the corporation it multiplied, divided and grew faster than anyone had ever imagined. Hence, I say we lost our minds because we insisted upon the independence and control we could exert with our personal little power house. I don’t know if it was freedom, control, lack of control or fiefdom building but we did indeed loose our minds and somehow convinced ourselves that this is all in the name of progress. You see that cute little screen had one problem, you were not in control of it. To put it another way you could not waste your day away tinkering with it, loading, downloading, uploading, it simply did its job and that was that. The beauty was in the simplicity of the machine itself and not in the designer colors, purely utilitarian.

Now I’m not saying that computers within the workplace are an evil thing, quite the opposite, they are tools and no different than a carpenter needing a hammer. But as a consultant with no particular ties to any organization I see first hand how much time is wasted with the current deployments of desktops across the corporation. Waste starts with help desks needing help desks to the clerical staff just competent enough to figure out how not to make the PC function. Need I mention here the social network and gaming scene that so many employees engage in on corporate time. We deploy armies of technicians and consultants managing what should be by this stage of the product game the equivalent of a toaster.

Our forefathers had it correct in the beginning; centralize the processes and control so that business can focus, on well business, and not the technical aspects of desktop computing. With professional staff managing all aspect of the computer operation we are left with completing the tasks we were originally hired for. It is at the juncture, a point, a critical juncture that can change the landscape of computing by simply returning what wasn’t rightfully ours in the first place. We need to understand that control was never ours in the first place, it was just an illusion of control and the sooner we can come to grips with this fact the faster the adoption of hosted desktop solutions.

Imagine if you will what your corporation could accomplish if you simply did not have to manage the desktop environment. As I have said earlier we can take a lesson from history, no one was really concerned about data when the forklift ran over the terminal we just plugged in another terminal and we were in essence running in less than a few minutes. I dare anyone to try that in today’s PC environment.

As managers, directors, and executives it is time we come to terms with central process control and the less we focus on our short comings and the need for control. Now that hosted desktops are coming of age are you ready to propel your organization?