The Kindness of strangers can defeat proprietary cloud computing

I certainly don't wish to turn my nose at the Cloud, but as this article points out, there are downsides to everything. The thing that has been bothering me the most is that for the first time, I have handed someone else the power to massively waste my time.

Let me explain. If I click "upgrade" on a kubuntu box right now, my KDE 3 turns into KDE 4. If I don't want KDE 4 (I don't like it, or I don't have time to set up and familiarise myself with a new desktop paradigm) I can choose not to push the button.

If Nintendo go bankrupt tomorrow and disappear off the face of the world, I can still play Age of Empires on my DS.

As a counterexample, after setting myself a nice little workflow using Google Notebook, Google decided they didn't care about Notebook anymore. I could not choose to keep using it. Google had a lovely iPhone specific interface to their iGoogle portal. I started using it as an RSS reader (something it did very well). Then Google decided they didn't want to provide it anymore. I didn't have the choice to keep using it as an old unsupported version; it was gone. Of course, I have the choice not to use iGoogle, but then I have to invest time to get used to netvibes, say.

The problem with the cloud is that while it gives you what you want, everything is rosy; but you have no control over your environment any more. In a away, free-to-the-user services are worse; when Netflix withdrew its multiple queue support and its paying customers protested, it brought them back. As a commercial service they felt they had to pay attention to their paying customers. When Google takes something away, or fails to improve a service because they are off on their next shiny-but-soon-to-languish beta, the user has no leverage at all.

I still like the Cloud; but I am nowhere as gung-ho about moving everything to it as I once was.

Or maybe there just aren't alternatives that provide the same value.