Hacker News Reader

Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

Someday we have to figure out this app-death thing. There has to be a better way.

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.

View on HN

There is: Release a piece of software that runs locally. There's no reason document-organizing software needs to be in "the cloud".

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.

And give an open source license.

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.

There is a perfectly good reason why document-organizing software needs to be in "the cloud." We live in the cloud. I want access to my stuff from my desktop, my laptop, my phone, from work, from a coffee shop, everywhere.

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.

If anything, that might be a reason why you want the documents in the "cloud", but why would you want to have the software in the "cloud"?

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.

> If anything, that might be a reason why you want the documents in the "cloud", but why would you want to have the software in the "cloud"?

Because otherwise you can't do anything with the documents except from the one computer that you put your $400 software on.

Is that a joke I'm not getting? If not, please explain.

OK, so I have foobar.something stored on my cloud server. If I only have the software to read it on one computer, the existence of that file in the cloud is not useful to me when I'm away from that computer. If the software is also in the cloud, that problem goes away. Cloud-based software solves many of the problems of distribution.

I still don't get it. I would think the internet solves the problem of distribution. If you don't have the software on your computer, you can use the internet to copy it to your computer!?

And the licensing model obviously is completely orthogonal to the execution environment.

OK, fill in the blanks: I have my InDesign document in the cloud. I head down to Kinko's to print it and I _______?

(The realistic answer is "can't unless I brought my laptop" AFAIK.)

I don't have a clue what you can do with InDesign documents or what Kinko's is, but I am pretty sure that running some software "in the cloud" is not the (only) solution.

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.

Doo was free. It's great in that it indexes and OCRs everything wherever it is located: you don't have to move the documents into the database like Evernote requires.

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.

Ironically, classic "desktop" apps solve most of this. Even if Microsoft went out of business, Microsoft Word would still work.

Are you sure? I would have thought the inability to verify your license would put an expiration date on Word if Microsoft vanished in a puff of smoke.

Grab the cracked version from the Pirate Bay then. Or use LibreOffice, Calligra, AbiWord, etc.

On the topic of cracked versions: I thought we were working within the framework of the law. If not, it's true, we have a world of options such as "Hold the developer at gunpoint and force him to keep working on it." I'm not sure very many people would want their software infrastructure based on law-breaking, though.

As for switching software: That puts us roughly in the same place we are when SaaS companies go under.

So, using a cracked version of a software that you have bought a license for but that the vendor does not allow you to use anymore anyway is roughly equivalent to holding a developer at gunpoint?

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.

Or you could switch (legally) now and not have to worry about it in the future. Operations in general is about risk management, I won't tell you what to do, I'm just saying there actually are options.

The thing is, obsolescence is an issue even for desktop software. The company where I work recently went through a fairly painful upgrade process for some software we were using that was no longer supported. We could have kept using it, but it was becoming more and more troublesome as the software failed to keep up with the times.

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).

FWIW I think this is the killer issue of this particular point in time. So far the only idea I can see all the pieces for is a new kind of appliance which is your personal "cloud." This would be analagous to an air conditioner or refrigerator in your house, but built with massively open sort of infrastructure (much like existing appliances use standardized fittings and filters and what not). Then into this home 'cloud' a platform for hosting "apps" which you buy and install, and basically run forever until you de-install them or replace them with something better. A server appliance for the rest of the world as it were.

So instead of doing timeshare on a remote computer, people could have appliances that do computing and file storage directly in their homes. We could simply call these "personal computers", to emphasize the shift in control.

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.)

I sense sarcasm here, but there actually isn't a good solution for the situation you're talking about. PCs are absolutely not standardized and universally compatible (even ones without ties to a corporation), and none of the ones we have are a good substitute for a cloud service in many respects.

What exactly is not standardized about PCs that would matter for this kind of application?!

What is "this kind of application"?

Not a BIOS, bootloader, OS kernel, hardware driver?

This "personal computer" thing will never work.

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.

I do hope things go this direction, but the trouble here is the lack of security updates when people keep running abandoned software for years. It's the same situation as desktop software, but now connected to the internet. With desktop software you can fix most of that by not opening documents from unknown emails and by blocking it with your firewall.

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.

Fair points. I've thought a lot about the security aspects, not as much about the DDOS aspects. Lets start with the only port this private cloud thing shows to Internet is the equivalent of a key authenticated SSH port. You're chrome book or laptop or phone can connect securely, everyone else is rather stuck. DDos is pretty easy to do address/port banning but not pure traffic banning. An IP transit provider could simply not pass traffic that wasn't SSH tunneled which could help.

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 :-)

> Lets start with the only port this private cloud thing shows to Internet is the equivalent of a key authenticated SSH port. You're chrome book or laptop or phone can connect securely, everyone else is rather stuck.

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?

Well the way I think about it Flickr is still a 'publication' service rather than a storage service. So you store your pictures in your cloud, you upload the ones you want to share to Flickr. This is the model my Dad uses for example (pushing images he wants to share to Picasa but leaving the bulk of his photos on a storage unit at home). His challenge was he decides he wants to share one while not at home, and he can't, but with this private cloud abstraction he can, he just shares it like it would from home, except rather than being at home and uploading it from his storage stack he is on the road and uploading from his storage stack.

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.

Beyond my expertise, but I think a (cryptographically sound) distributed publishing system would be possible. It looks like Freenet is a project doing something like this, but more as a way to anonymous and decentralized way to publish information. The kind of implementation I'm thinking of would have to allow for updates to propagate, or for pages to be deleted (at least in the sense that you can with Flickr, even though someone else might have made a copy).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet#Distributed_storage_and...

we're working on something like this: http://protonet.info - we strongly believe in a distributed future... do a google on protonet if you're interested.

Embrace creative destruction. Apps die and it gives new ones a chance to fill the space. Keeps the ecosystem responsive and gives everybody a chance to innovate.

Want apps to stick around? Enjoy Excel, Photoshop, etc. :)

That may work for games, but it's just stupid for what is essentially infrastructure. Some creative destruction may well make sense there as well at times (instead of accumulating cruft indefinitely), but there are major costs associated with doing so, so an approach that has a high probability of requiring a complete rebuild every couple of years is just moronic.

Embrace the 'creative' destruction of all the documents I store with a cloud provider?

Yeah, no thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com