Fix the Cloud, or Give Up

I've long had mixed feelings about online subscription services and the cloud in general, especially when its usefulness pales in comparison to workstation-centric computing.

If I can buy 5TB of portable hard disk storage for $150, why should I be spending $10 a month for sub-terabyte cloud storage for my backups? Offsite storage safety? Well, I can keep the backup drive in a safe deposit box at the bank, the trunk of the car, at a friend's house, or in a fireproof safe at home.

I did sing the praises of the Adobe Creative Cloud because professionals get specialized tools and access to all the Adobe products. I'm losing hope for that idea. Adobe is suddenly introducing additions, such as crappy stock photos, for an additional fee. This should be part of the Creative Cloud Suite and defeats the purpose of the original idea.

Microsoft got on this bandwagon with Office 365, which includes three to five licenses for a yearly price between $65-$100. This includes a terabyte of cloud storage on OneDrive, which is only marginally useful with a file limitation of 20,000 files (which the company promises to fix).

Still, this model has potential.

The real winner will be the vendor that figures out what the cloud can actually do that cannot easily be done at the desktop. I don't mean the storage and sorting of email, the distribution of money by PayPal, or the storefront and inventory management of a NetSuite.

Here's an example: Autodesk and its cloud offering is designed to take complex plans and do certain mind-numbing calculations that are impractical on the desktop.

A more recent example will soon be implemented by the backup and recovery company Acronis. In a recent meeting with the CEO, it was revealed that the company intends to develop the code to do full text searches on the giant backup files maintained by users.

In other words, if I back up to the Acronis cloud, I can now use search software to hammer the files looking for very specific wordage or whatever. This would be a godsend if the search was fast and efficient compared to the miserable and always-failing Microsoft search, the resource hungry desktop search engines from various vendors, or the brute-force search of programs such as FileSeek.

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What are some of the added benefits that can be performed on data stored in the cloud? Think high-end machine translation where massive amounts of computing power can be targeted at a language translation chore. Right now, online translations seem to be using underpowered tools that can easily be run on the desktop (often with better results).

Microsoft should add a cloud-based grammar and spelling analysis that would be impossible at the PC level. It should be something that works well to an extreme. A sentence such as: "I right the sin tense wit it in mind that thee worlds are spelt wrung" should not be seen as okay in any universe. But Microsoft Word looked over that mess and gave it the thumbs up. No errors. Letting crap like that pass with flying colors is laughable.

In fact, running the manual spelling and grammar checker gives me the message "Spelling and grammar check complete. You're good to go!" Really? Use the cloud to fix these things! I'm sure that when you think about it, you'll discover lots of cools ideas that can be implemented in the cloud, too. Let's do it.