Enough of the "cloud" computing crap. ENOUGH!

[CPA]

Heh, reminds me of the whole knowledge/document/records management craze. The solution is to "put everything on SharePoint." The only problem is that nobody can find the information they are looking for. Companies have shifted from publishing reports and memos to just tossing data back and forth. The result is that companies simply don't know what they have done in the past and are forced to constantly reinvent the wheel and operate inefficiently. It is incredibly frustrating to be asked what research our company has done on X topic and not being able to find ANYTHING because nobody writes reports on their research any more.

lol, great call. Sharepoint is a waste of time.

 

[TheVrolok]

Actually it makes great sense. You just "rent" OS space that is always up to date, has access to all productivity applications you could want for a low price, all your data is (in theory) backed up...and you can log in and use it from virtually any computer that supported the front end of the service.

Consumers get up to date applications and security, that is backed up and providers can almost entirely forget about piracy and bank on monthy rental revenue.

Well, I don't want my personal data at a remote location. Also, what about us PC gamers? PC Gaming surely won't be possible via Cloud. For productivity programs, Cloud is fine, but I simply don't want to do my "personal stuff" via remote applications with remote storage.

 

[alkemyst]

More like naive post by arrogant poster. Most people here seem to forget that most of the world has no idea what the internet is capable of beyond sending emails and playing games on Facebook. Microsoft is keenly aware of this fact and they are marketing towards it, pushing people to find new things to do with their computers.

QFT...most of the large enterprise level corporations including the one I work for are very interested in moving to cloud-based backend.

It's just like people that laughed at back ups going from tape to disk, local server drives to shared SANs, etc.

On a cloud you can deploy data deduplication, cache common hits, etc.

 

[holden j caufield]

we've done the citrix thing, it's ok. We tried TS app on server 2008 when it first came out. There are bugs but I see it making great in roads, like virtualization has been around for a long time but I've really seen a great push the last few years.

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

lol, great call. Sharepoint is a waste of time.

So, so true. Our IT department (20k+ employees) again tried to demand that they custom program SP to do what our department needs when we have an existing app that does it for <$5k/year. The great part is that the app we have is 250k lines of code, so just imagine the cost involved in making SP do all that.

 

[ShawnD1]

Unless you don't have a network connection ;^)

This. I get emails almost every day saying something to the effect that they're doing some kind of maintenance and the server will be down for a while. Since we don't have an in-house server, I give files to my coworker by putting them on a USB drive and physically walking over to his desk. It's retarded. There was also a problem where nobody in my office could reach the server and write down billable hours.
Internet connections are just too unreliable.

If Microsoft can't get Windows Live to work efficiently and consistently, how can we have any amount in trust that they can get a cloud environment working efficiently?

The most frustrating part is when Windows Live doesn't even work with Windows. Go ahead and try to run MSN Messenger in Windows 7. It will keep a minimum of 2 windows open at all times because it won't just sit in the system tray like a good program would.

 

[Fritzo]

Citrix has been doing that for the better part of 15 years.

Citrix is also $$$$$$$$$$$$$$, requires a lot of technical expertise, and in house hardware. Not the same thing.

You can get a Google Apps Premier account for around $50/year, and each email address under it costs $5. With it, you get site building, document sharing, personalized Gmail, scheduling, and syncing with smart phones. This is an example of a cloud computing solution, and it's selling like hot cakes. In fact, San Fransisco's govt moved to it exclusively, along with many other municipalities due to the cost savings and reduced IT dependence alone.

 

[Zebo]

Will it play crisis faster? Then i'm interested.

 

[Fritzo]

This. I get emails almost every day saying something to the effect that they're doing some kind of maintenance and the server will be down for a while. Since we don't have an in-house server, I give files to my coworker by putting them on a USB drive and physically walking over to his desk. It's retarded. There was also a problem where nobody in my office could reach the server and write down billable hours.
Internet connections are just too unreliable.


The most frustrating part is when Windows Live doesn't even work with Windows. Go ahead and try to run MSN Messenger in Windows 7. It will keep a minimum of 2 windows open at all times because it won't just sit in the system tray like a good program would.

What kind of untrained monkeys are running your network that they would take critical systems down during the middle of the work day? And from what it sounds like on a regular basis? You're supposed to have maintenance windows (weekends, early AM hours) for that kind of thing. People in my company would get fired for doing that. Seriously.

 

[OutHouse]

Here's how it works in a nutshell- all apps are web based, and stored on central servers. Therefore everything is available from any Internet connection, and in theory you can work from any location. Your information and apps are not tied to a computer, they follow you anywhere you go.

sounds a lot like the citrix farm i built and manage.

 

[exdeath]

The whole cloud thing is great, except the part where it's all remote and 3 kbps at certain times of the day instead of running an app locally on your 4 GHZ 8 core CPU...

The theory behind distributed and accessible computing is great, but we have a loooong way to go.

Lost count of how many times I've wanted to smash my head into a desk because of simple UI lag or waiting for some abstracted tunneled across the planet back end virtual process at some remote location that I had no control over... Just let me get the file via FTP, process it locally, and send it back, screw this real time cloud shit.

Anyone who has ever experienced loading a web page only to have it hang, and down at the bottom it says "Waiting for ads.website.com..............................." or had to load 50 MB of flash video ads, or god forbid launch Lotus Notes, to read a 2k TEXT email message, knows the frustration that over use of abstraction, visualization, and remote/distributed computing can bring...

 

[Cattlegod]

it is great - high asset utilization and passing costs of maintaining servers to the experts. cloud computing is just removing the integration of some SGA costs and thus turning the costs into variable from fixed

 

[OutHouse]

What kind of untrained monkeys are running your network that they would take critical systems down during the middle of the work day? And from what it sounds like on a regular basis? You're supposed to have maintenance windows (weekends, early AM hours) for that kind of thing. People in my company would get fired for doing that. Seriously.

same here, we can only bring down customer facing servers between midnight and 2am. if a server is down during business hours it better have a serious problem.

 

[OutHouse]

Citrix is also $$$$$$$$$$$$$$, requires a lot of technical expertise, and in house hardware. Not the same thing.

You can get a Google Apps Premier account for around $50/year, and each email address under it costs $5. With it, you get site building, document sharing, personalized Gmail, scheduling, and syncing with smart phones. This is an example of a cloud computing solution, and it's selling like hot cakes. In fact, San Fransisco's govt moved to it exclusively, along with many other municipalities due to the cost savings and reduced IT dependence alone.

we do all that now. citrix, BES, Good, sharepoint. TFS... to be honest hosting all that sounds like a nightmare plus we (my company) has to worry about PII (personal identifiable infomation) security. in our business i dont think your customers would be too thrilled if all that info was hosted at a third party data center.

 

[OutHouse]

The solution is to "put everything on SharePoint." The only problem is that nobody can find the information they are looking for.

excellent point. i hate sharepoint and so does everybody else in our IT dept. we have put so much shit in sharepoint i cant find a damn thing. if i do a search it takes like 15 minutes to get a result and that result is a fricken list of crap i have to sort through to find what i am looking for. But the company brass was sold on it and made us install it and made the rest of the dev dept use it. ive just come to the realization im just a IT monkey and just do what im told even if it is a bad decision.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

HAY! YOU! Get off my cloud

 

[Leros]

Person at Best Buy: Does this computer have the cloud in it? We want the cloud.

True story

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

excellent point. i hate sharepoint and so does everybody else in our IT dept. we have put so much shit in sharepoint i cant find a damn thing. if i do a search it takes like 15 minutes to get a result and that result is a fricken list of crap i have to sort through to find what i am looking for. But the company brass was sold on it and made us install it and made the rest of the dev dept use it. ive just come to the realization im just a IT monkey and just do what im told even if it is a bad decision.

Hey now, that was my quote, not CPA's!

Our corporate SharePoint has probably 10,000 items in it. Just to piss everyone off I am considering tying in our external app and dumping those documents in...all 55,000

 

[GuitarDaddy]

But seriously I don't trust the cloud, the cloud frightens me. I really don't like network drives and only use them for backups, but I haven't had the greatest experiences with network reliability.

 

[OutHouse]

Hey now, that was my quote, not CPA's!

Our corporate SharePoint has probably 10,000 items in it. Just to piss everyone off I am considering tying in our external app and dumping those documents in...all 55,000

opps sorry

lol ill buy you lunch if you do it.

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

lol ill buy you lunch if you do it.

Already got approval from our SP admin. The idea is to set up a Google search appliance between the SP and our application. I expect a very nice lunch!

 

[IronWing]

My company uses citrix to house GIS layers. The theory is that data can be maintained more easily. It works great...if you happen to work in the home office. Work in a branch office and you wait and wait and wait for a project to load. We've taken to storing layers locally and updating when it occurs to us. The citrix gurus tell us we're not being efficient. We tell them to buy faster connections or stuff it. If there is a local caching/replicate function in citrix either it costs too much or our IT folks didn't get to that chapter in the manual. Sharepoint implementation has been a mess since it was implemented with no user training. Employees just don't see the point when network drives are available.

 

[OutHouse]

Already got approval from our SP admin. The idea is to set up a Google search appliance between the SP and our application. I expect a very nice lunch!

lol, doesn't count if you have prior approval. i was under the impression you were going to go maverick and just do it.

 

[mcmilljb]

To the Cloud!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjtqoQE_ezA

 

[IGBT]

and don't forget the subscription fees it will take to stay on the cloud.