In a recent New York Times op-ed, Lost in the Cloud, Jonathan Zittrain writes about the dangers of cloud computing. He refers to cloud computing in its most general sense, basically any application with an online component, whether it be data hosted in the cloud, like Facebook profiles, applications distributed through the cloud, like iPhone applications, or web applications hosted in the cloud, like Spindle Law (though suprisingly he doesn’t cite us). He mentions a number of concerns but the one he says is “the the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate.” His argument is that when applications are built for platforms like Facebook, innovation ultimately suffers because those applications are subject to the whims of Facebook’s platform policy. Similarly, Apple is the gatekeeper for the all iPhone applications, rejecting applications for reasons of competition, their definition of appropriateness, or for unexplained reasons.

Zittrain acknowledges there are cloud hosting services like Amazon AWS and Google App Engine, which allow hosting generic applications without gatekeeping. But he quickly glosses over these services and fails to see how much these types of services foster innovation. Although he laments for the time when developers were “writing whatever they wanted for PCs,” he doesn’t mention that cloud hosting has effectively allowed developers to write whatever they want for the web. One reason many applications are built for the web and not PCs, is that distributing software is hard. On the web, anyone with a browser can access your application without worrying about installation and upgrades. Services like Amazon and Google, as well as managed hosting services who now include cloud hosting such as Rackspace Cloud,  lower the barrier of entry to hosting a web application to the point that anyone with an idea and technical know-how can try it out. For a start-up such as ours, to have access to the infrastructure and add-on services of Amazon with an investment of very little money, time, and resources is a tremendous advantage. To be sure, Zittrain does not advocate turning away from the cloud but to be cautious that it “does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software.”  From our perspective, the cloud has been anything but a hinderance.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 7:13 am . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.