Tastes A Lot Like Chicken
March 5th, 2010 by ComputerBob
Regular readers of this Journal know that I’ve never trusted free online service providers like Google or Yahoo! with any of my personal or confidential data.
And I have absolutely no interest in storing any of my data — confidential or not — “in the cloud.”
So, instead of using online applications that run on someone else’s computers, or trusting my data’s security and confidentiality to online service providers who make hundreds of billions of dollars every year by exploiting their users’ personal data, I run all of my applications right here on my PC, and I store all of my data and backu0ps — confidential or not — right here on my own PC, file server and external media.
But over the past few years, I’ve seen more and more articles, written by proponents of online applications and “the cloud” that make fun of people like me; calling us Luddites, dinosaurs, and any other derisive terms they can think of, to try make people like me feel like we’re old fogeys who are going to be left behind by the progressive-thinking futurists that they consider themselves to be.
Whenever that happens, I remember the old adage that says that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, he’ll jump right out. But if you drop him into a pan of cool water and then gradually heat the water to a boil, he’ll happily sit in that pot until he’s cooked to death.
The way I see it, Google and its competitors are the cooks.
Their online services and “the cloud” are the pot.
And we’re the frogs.
Many of us have already happily jumped into the pot, thinking that the water is nice and cool — or at least bearably warm.
But don’t fool yourself — the heat is on.
And the water is gradually getting hotter every day — whether you notice it or not.
Because, despite what their self-serving advertising campaigns may say, Google’s and its competitors’ ultimate goal is not to provide online services and data storage to everyone for free.
Their ultimate goal is to make money.
Lots and lots of money.
Way more than the hundreds of billions of dollars each year that they already make now.
And they plan to do it by making PCs obsolete.
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Consumer Info, Dubious, Ethics, Freedom, Future, Google, Internet, Rights, Security, Video