Dr. Evil or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud

Warning: this blog post is a bit all over the place. Everything seems related in my head, or at least it did when I first wrote it. 1/3 history lesson, 2/3 future lesson. Trace relevance to CAD. Lamenting the rule of corporations. A bit of a crazy rant thrown in for good measure.

Some of you young punks may need help with the title of the post. Back in the era of black and white television, before ADD/ ADHD and Google, there was this thing called the “cold war”. No one dropped any bombs, but there was a bit of banging with a shoe.

After that, now pay attention. After that there was a movie where Slim Pickens, the great cowboy actor when even Sam Elliot was a young punk, rode an atomic bomb out of the gate of a B-52 somewhere short of the target in Russia. The movie of course was Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, and it is a cold war cult classic. Get the torrent, no one pays for content any more.

If you’re the paranoid type, you may want to take whatever sort of medication keeps you from panicking right about now. Maybe take a handful.

So. The cold war was all about paranoia. And so, it turns out, is most of the jive about “the cloud”. Of course behind the paranoia are some very real reasons to not love what’s going on. It turns out that your CAD hardware and software choices are being driven by pop culture and electronic toys. But hold it, I thought CAD was a tool used to create the electronic toys that drive pop culture? Well, yes. A bit of circular logic, it seems. Sure it’s the new thing, and everything is headed that way, but why? Is there a reason? I’ve always been told that renting an apartment or a car is just throwing money away. Why is it any different to rent compute power, especially when it is so cheap to own? Is this being done for me or to me?

“The cloud” is much larger than this little announcement by SolidWorks at SWW10. It is the entire computer/software/internet industry. I think it is instructive to listen to what other people have to say. The folks among us who are pushing the cloud are either industry observers, or people with something to sell. That’s the first thing to learn. So people with a stake in there being a steady stream of stuff that you can’t live without believe in the cloud. I tend to ignore the lemmings who just buy every new gadget because its new. For these people tech is fashion, not tooling.

The second thing to notice when reading what non-CAD folks have to say is that there are a lot of skeptics, even among the gadget enthusiasts. So users in general aren’t all falling down in front of the pre-marketing tenderizer that is currently trying to soften us all up for when the shoe finally falls. Corporations are pouring money into this right now. They are betting that users are going to buy into it. There is so much additional profit at stake for them, that theymust make it work. Users don’t stand a chance. The free market is not so free at all.

There were some links going around this weekend, and I sat down to catch up reading. The most interesting thing that caught my eye was entitled “The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash”. Well, I hate flash, and I’m not real big on Steve Jobs. I thought that Jobs and Adobe would not see eye to eye because they were direct competitors in a bid to rule the Earth. It turns out that’s not far from the truth.

Anyway, I recommend you go and read the original article by clicking on the image from Charlie’s Diary. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, I have some quotes here for you, sprinkled with commentary.

Software will be delivered as a service to users wherever they are, via whatever device they’re looking at — their phone, laptop, tablet, the TV, a direct brain implant, whatever. (Why is this? Well, it’s what everyone believes — everyone in the industry, anyway. Because it offers a way to continue to make money, by selling software as a service, despite the cost of the hardware exponentially dropping towards zero. And, oh, it lets you outsource a lot of annoying shitty admin tasks like disk management, backup, anti-virus, and so on.)

Huh. So “the cloud” is a concept being pushed by people who are not making money any longer on hardware, so they have to push something they can make money on. “The cloud” is in no way a user initiative, it is just a way to extend the profitability of portable electronic toys.

And because the hardware is so cheap to own right now, why exactly is it that I should rent it and pay more?

The App Store and the iTunes Store have taught Steve Jobs that ownership of the sales channel is vital. Even if he’s reduced to giving the machines away, as long as he can charge rent for access to data (or apps) he’s got a business model.

Whoa. Rent your own data. Why would I push all my data to the cloud if I just have to turn around and rent it back? Honestly. This doesn’t make a bit of sense from a user point of view. Why not Win7 that allows you to serve and stream your own data from your own location? That makes more sense.

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry.

The time scale here is exactly what SolidWorks is talking about. 2 – 5 years, with some stuff happening this year. Plus, is this guy saying Apple is responsible in the end for SolidWorks pushing customers to the cloud? Idon’t think Apple is solely responsible, but it is a bigger movement from  industry who has seen all of the profitability go out of hardware sales, is desperately looking for a way to control software piracy, and much greater profitability in renting compute power from a fixed location (cloud) to a mobile location (your iPad). And Jobs is certainly a high profile hardware seller.

Steve Jobs undoubtedly believes what he (or an assistant) wrote in his thoughts on flash: “Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps.” And he really does not want cross-platform apps that might divert attention and energy away from his application ecosystem.

Ohhh, I get it. So Jobs likes progress as long as it is progress that puts money in his pocket, not someone elses. Cross-platform is ok as long as Apple is the main beneficiary. General cross-platform where anyone can benefit is evil. Check, I understand Mr. Jobs. Highly hypocritical, but I think we have come to expect that from him.

The long term goal is to support the long-term migration of Apple from being a hardware company with a software arm into being a cloud computing company with a hardware subsidiary — almost like Google, if you squint at the Google Nexus One in the right light. The alternative is to join the PC industry in a long death spiral into irrelevance.

So. In a nutshell, Steve Jobs really is the mastermind Dr. Evil trying to rule the Earth. Cloud is an industry initiative to squeeze more profit out of consumers and giving back mainly portability. That’s great for electronic toys, but – and I’m really squinting here – but I just don’t see the application to CAD. Uh, is this when CAD makes paper obsolete like they’ve been predicting for decades now?

I’m sorry. The Cloud is a sham being foisted on users exclusively for profit, not because it first answers user needs. Sure some users will benefit from this. But the user need is like 25% or less, and the corporation is going to try to force it to 100% because of profit concerns.

I’m as much a supporter of the free market as any other small business owner, but this is not the free market. This is a handful of unstoppably huge corporations stacking the deck. Once corporations grow past a certain point, they become a liability not only to society but also to civilization. The democrats and republicans are fading into irrelevance. Corporate brands are what rule America now, and the vote is clearly rigged.