“Doo – the document app” will be shutting down
doo.net
doo.net
If anything, this highlights a problem with the model of SAAS in general: whether it be 3 years out, 10 years out, or 25 years away, these companies and the tools we might begin to depend on are not reliably sustainable.
Is there a better model? What if we all had our own private cloud servers, running apps that we purchased that communicated with each other independent of a central entity? What if they were as easy to set up as the current SaaS signup we know so well? What if it were even easier?
Personally I would love a personally-curated library of tools, on which I could control the end-of-life story. But this also brings up many new problems. New and interesting problems.
Want apps to stick around? Enjoy Excel, Photoshop, etc. :)
Yeah, no thanks.
One major reason SaaS is so popular is people can't figure out how to write programs worth paying for. If you wrap it up in some vague notion of a "service", customers assume they're getting some kind of ongoing value.
It might be a pain to install, run and maintain, which is why you pay for the service. But, if the service dies you have a path forward if your life or business depends on it.
I want to be able to read a document, write a document, edit a document, share a document whenever I have the time to do so, and I want more software that does this, not less.
The idea of personal clouds is compelling, if we can only make configuration easy, and figure out how to pay the application developers.
And, actually, the way the "cloud" was understood before the hype, your documents are "in the cloud" as soon as they are on a computer that is connected to the internet. I don't need a "cloud provider" or even a "personal cloud" in order to access the documents stored on my machine at home from my laptop, both are connected to the internet, that's all that is needed.
That it might be possible to make all of that easier to use is still true, though.
Because otherwise you can't do anything with the documents except from the one computer that you put your $400 software on.
And the licensing model obviously is completely orthogonal to the execution environment.
(The realistic answer is "can't unless I brought my laptop" AFAIK.)
Other solutions probably would be a different licensing model or an open data format, possibly converting your InDesign document to an open format beforehand, or logging into your computer at home from someone else's machine, or in some other way using software on your machine at home remotely, or probably numerous others, most of them probably with a huge advantage in terms of privacy/resistance to surveillance over a solution where you process your own data in unencrypted form on other people's machines.
Imagine how amazing it would be if there was a standard for processor architecture and a standard for operating system software, so that you could write software that runs on any such "P.C." appliance out there. (But if that standard fell into the hands of a corporation, there would certainly be potential for some scary monopoly abuse.)
First of all, people will have to maintain the hardware. Can you imagine your average user doing that? The average CPU would probably catch fire from dust build-up if non-system-administrators were put in charge of them. Each individual "PC" owner would have horribly low purchasing power, too, so any time one of these personal computers broke, they'd have to pay a ridiculous one-off retail-unit price to get a new one. No volume discounts!
Second, these machines wouldn't be near network peering points, like colocated machines are. They'd have horrible network latency and throughput, and a lot of residential ISPs wouldn't even let you talk to them from anywhere else. How would you get your data from your home, of all places, when you're at work? Can you imagine what horrible BitTorrent performance they'd have compared to the standard cloud seedbox?
In fact, there would almost certainly be times when they're either broken, or just switched off. Which means that these "personal computers" wouldn't be highly available like our everyday cloud-agents are, so other services couldn't rely on anything like webhooks to communicate state-changes with them. With enough of these "PCs", services would likely be architected with this "might be broken/off" model in mind, providing only RPC-based protocols, and disallowing pub-sub altogether.
And without push-based data delivery, you'd lose half the point of having a personal machine-agent: keeping data intended for you stored safely on your machine with your encryption, instead of leaving it buffered at the sender.
Why, I bet you'd see companies sprouting up to "serve this need" by acting as intermediaries, where instead of your friends directly pushing data over to your agent, they'd send them to the intermediary's agent, who would then wait for you, later on, to come and actively retrieve them using your "personal computer." And I bet that with such an important place in dataflow, these intermediaries could convince people (these poor people) that it's safe to just encrypt the messages with the intermediary's private key, instead of the receiver's! Automatic agent-to-agent peer-based crypto might never take off at all, and we could see some centralized system based on trusting rich companies to hold your data where anyone from some advertiser to the NSA might snoop on it!
...but I'm being ridiculous. Surely things couldn't get that bad.
You can guard against some of this on a personal cloud by having VPNs as a standard part of the appliance, but I suspect there are other problems that aren't as easily predicted or fixed. For instance, if my personal copy of Google Docs is running on my specific unit, how does it handle a DDoS? That's one big advantage of having a third party hosting and managing the servers instead of say, my grandma.
So if you're in that world, now the attack vector is to get you to download something to your phone which can then use the tunnel to look at other stuff in your cloud. This isn't a whole lot different than now, phishing out your gmail password for example or keylogging it. VPN key stealing might be made more complicated by an authenticator type device (that may be too complex for Grandma though)
On the platform itself the OS isn't exposed. Not fun for computer people but better for Grandma. Jails/containers what not for apps which keep execution domains isolated, and resource consumption managed, Etc.
But to your point it isn't an "easy" solution to the problem of the ephemeralness of the cloud :-) but it does keep your access to stuff around. When I look at things like blu-ray players which run the script code in Blu-ray disks I think about virtual machines as containers might be an option here. Also running win98 in a vmware player. It is entirely concievable that some sort of environment is always virtualized for "long lived" compatibility.
Of course if I had all the answers I'd be hiring to build it rather than just making notes in my notebook :-)
That makes your "cloud" into something more like an encrypted storage container than what we currently think of as a "cloud." How would something like, say, Flickr work on that? How would other people see the pictures you share?
When Picasa loses favor with Larry and gets shut down, his data is still safe he has just lost his ability to point people at Picasa and can switch to Flickr. My assertion (which I agree is yet unproven) is that we didn't start designing things this way because bandwidth to the cloud was always better than bandwidth to your 'home' (which was largely dial-up early on).
But unlike a pure storage container I'd love to be able to use an email service which will 'drop off' my email into this infrastructure, which I can read at my leisure but not have it stored in the 'cloud' where it can get lost (or perhaps spied upon).
In some ways your satellite TV receiver (especially if it has 'sling box' type capabilities) is sort of along the system design models of having a captive bit of compute/storage in your home that offers you service on the road and at home, and the vendor can push content into. Think about that for services other than just TV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet#Distributed_storage_and...
Here's the problem: the only revenue source was people who want to store their docs in the cloud. Keep in mind, that would be ALL your documents. That's a tough sell for me.
As for switching software: That puts us roughly in the same place we are when SaaS companies go under.
And no, if(!) you still have a full copy of your data in an open format, that's a much better starting point for switching to different software.
No matter what software you choose to use and no matter what model the company employs to provide the software, it's really important that the party behind the software is in it for the long haul, because otherwise you're going to have to deal with that.
Basically, look at the business model for the company. Does it look like one that will be around in a few years? It's usually not that hard to tell (in particular, things being given away for free like Doo tend to be transient).
Here is what I want and it would be interesting to know how other people on HN solve that. I have no problem managing my digital documents, I have that covered. However paper (carbon-copy, dead-tree) - now this gives me a lot of headache. Even though I subscribed to electronic everything I could, I still many documents coming in paper: user manuals, medical test results, credit card agreements, some bills etc etc.
I hate managing and storing paper. I tried to setup a system that would scan, clean up, OCR documents, store searchable PDFs and (the key part) stored PDFs into folders (in my online backup provider's folder of choice) according to keywords or even performed some kind of machine learning classification (rent, medical, receipts, etc).
I had even created a concoction on Linux from SANE command line, ImageMagick, bunch of Python scripts that did that more or less, but once I moved to OS X that stopped working and I did not have time to port it yet.
While it manages the directory structure, all documents are stored "bare" in its filesystem folder. That is, you can create a Foo.pdf in DEVONthink and then access it from ~/Documents/whatever/PDFS/Foo.pdf (or however it names the directories).
Machine learning classifies incoming documents and can suggest relationships between them.
I'm not related to them, I promise. :-) I'd bought DT a while back but hadn't used it much until I got Doo as part of a software bundle. I played with it a while, realized I already had DT which was much more powerful, and started using it more.
The only thing I'm missing now is an Android "client" for it.
Sorry to piggyback: I have had a similar problem - hating paper, but drowning in it. I'm readying an OSX program to do this, if you are anyone else would be interested in trying it out/beta testing it (once it is ready! It isn't quite yet ready) in exchange for a free copy that would be awesome. So far designed to work for Scansnap or a workflow that OCR's the PDF's first.