Comments on: Will cloud computing reduce software prices?

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:18:47 +0000

Kalivd, thanks for mentioning this argument. It is probably the one you hear most often when it comes to web-based office apps. I have two objections: First, why shouldn’t it be possible to integrate simultaneous editing in what you call offline apps? Why should the offline app Firefox be more suitable for this feature than the offline app Word? The other question is if this is really a useful feature, which brings me to my second objection. I do not think that this has something to do with collaboration. Collaboration doesn’t mean that people do the same thing at the same time. Imagine two football players carrying the ball simultaneously. I doubt that this is a good strategy. It makes more sense if one runs ahead to catch the ball when his teammate is ready to toss it. I think many people using this simultaneous editing feature are just fascinated by the technology behind it. When I work with others on a document, I want to get informed whenever they changed something and want to know what they have changed. They should be able add comments and I want to be able to choose what changes I keep and what not. These are essential features of a text processing program when it comes to collaboration. Thus, in my opinion Google docs doesn’t really support collaboration. If you want real collaboration you better get MS Office with Sharepoint or Office Live.

Kris, agreed. Hardware management costs are an issue here. I do think that one can reduce costs with cloud computing in some environments. But in most cases it will reduce flexibility too. If you have your own IT under control, you simply have more options. This is the main reason why many companies gave up outsourcing. However, I think that renting complete servers in the cloud has its charm. I compared prices recently. An ordinary server with 16GB RAM costs about €300 per month. I think I can get this is a little cheaper if buy a server and put it in our own server room (management costs included). But prices might go down in the future. So this could become an interesting option.

By: Kris Huggins

Kris Huggins — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:12:46 +0000

The other aspect of cost savings is the cost savings in the personnel required to manage these cloud infrastructures. If you deploy your app to a cloud, you may need less people to manage hardware, network, failover, high availability, etc. You can get all of the architectural qualities and not have to maintain the staff to manage that infrastructure. Granted this won’t happen tomorrow, but it makes sense to me. If this doesn’t save money, it will open up smaller companies to infrastructures that have a quality of service that only larger companies can afford.

As for security & trust, responding to some of the comments. There are some big companies using SalesForce for CRM… there’s some sensitive information in there. That doesn’t mean that security is not a concern, but it does imply that problem has been solved to the satisfaction of some big companies at least in one cloud.

By: kalivd

kalivd — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:58:07 +0000

Well, first of all i would like to thank you on having taken interest. I myself have been a avid office suite user for more than a year now, It lets me COLLABORATE seamlessly and effortlessly on several docs. It s bye bye to the friggin NIGHTMARE of mail attachments and endless versioning chaos and disorder. And it really is a pleasure to collaborate in real-time on the same doc with these office suites not only me but all my colleagues and friends use the same while we are working on some project. With this gaining popularity one must not be surprised enough to see “Cloud Computing” as the next thing in IT.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:54:47 +0000

Dan, you are right, there have been already quite a few terms for “SaaS”. Before “ASP” it was just called outsourcing. The question is if anything fundamental changed within the last 10 years in this area. I’d say, no. The fact that we can now run super simple word processing programs in a web browser is not enough to convince me. As to your customer, what if they just installed MySQL on a Linux PC for $500. Wouldn’t that be even cheaper?

Leonardo, MDillenbeck these are exactly the same considerations when it comes to outsourcing. Will my service provider really be reliable enough? Will they be as flexible as our own IT? Will we really save money this way? Many companies had to answer these questions with “no” after they tried it. This led to the end of the outsourcing hype. I think it will be the same with the cloud hype. There will be more on-demand computing in the future. There is no doubt about that. However, this doesn’t mean that we will spend less for software or need fewer IT pros. The contrary is true.

kalivd, what about some arguments that support your view?

By: kalivd

kalivd — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:41:41 +0000

Cloud computing being the trend of the day it would not be suprising if everyone start using these webservices and stop using the offline applications, well the software prices will tend to drop as the demand for them will decrease as more and more people start using these cloud computing sites like eDeskOnline, Thinkfree.

By: MDillenbeck

MDillenbeck — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:41:55 +0000

I am skeptical about cloud computing over two issues: First, reliability/accessibility, as mentioned above; and second, security – if my apps are run over the web with sensitive data, is there adequate security protecting it?

I think the average home consumer would also be a bit suspicious of who might gain access to their data, and if both their ISP and the cloud software company could maintain a reliable and sufficiently fast enough service.

Call me paranoid, but I’d rather keep my software and files in-house.

By: Leonardo

Leonardo — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:34:15 +0000

The other facet of the cloud computing thing is that I’m sure there are admins like me: Those who do not trust cloud and web anything.
I run my backups local, I store my data local, what makes Microsoft or google think I would leave my apps at their whim?

Amazon’s S3 service just went down recently, what happens when there is a service outage for an application as simple as Excel or Word; or there’s a problem with my ISP or router and the net is down for 3 hours?

I just don’t trust anything. I don’t trust any provider to be up 100% of the time, I don’t trust a local server to be up 100% of the time either… But on a local server, I have control and a fairly firm ETA on a fix.
BTW: How many servers with decent hardware and decent maintenance/replacemnet schedule go down just “like that”?

By: Dan D. Gutierrez

Dan D. Gutierrez — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:10:15 +0000

By Dan D. Gutierrez
CEO of HostedDatabase.com

We launched the web’s first web-hosted database service, eCriteria.net, in 1999 so we’ve been in the SaaS (used to be called ASP) arena longer than most. It is that perspective that enables me to say that on-demand software solutions will not replace on-premise software, but it will definitely provide a viable option for certain classes of applications. In our case, we move the database to the cloud, and for our target class of customers, small businesses, our service did mean lower cost of software because they didn’t have to “buy” any database software or hire a programmer to write server-side code.

One of our customers has been with us for 7 years now. He’s paid us a total of around $3,500 during that time. If he had gone the on-premise route, we estimate his investment would have been more like $10,000.