Comments

• Needs Sunlight

  2013-03-05 18:44:41

  Seems like a continuation of M$ ongoing strategy to tip businesses and institutions into an ongoing state of crisis. Only in this case, they hold the data hostage directly, too. Once they collapse into crisis-management mode, rather than being proactive, they only react, and cannot plan ahead, not even to escape. In such a state they are easy marks for additional, ongoing M$ sales and, just as importantly for M$, unable to investigate or evaluate competing software.
  
  In these cases the data is held hostage not only by the proprietary data formats, but also by being on M$ hosted servers. That's an additional harm that "cloud" does. When the bills stop being paid, or the contract runs out, or M$ just feels like it, the data goes away. With data hosted on your own hardware, the data tends to stay until it is actively removed. On your own hardware, bulk transfers and backups are feasible. That is not the case with "cloud" data.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2013-03-05 19:02:20

  So-called 'clouds' create a dependency chain, where Amazon for example may have another company depend on its infrastructure; when all the marketing hype is removed it remains unclear why 'clouds' (remotely stored data) are popularised at all. But that's another subject that many news sites have already tackled.