“I am writing today to let you know that no more do I wander lonely as a cloud, and I hope no one will soon be telling me, “Hey you, get off of my cloud.”
WITH APOLOGIES to Wordsworth and Jagger, this is my way of saying that I have embraced the cloud. Of course, whether I liked it or not, it had embraced me, or perhaps, caught me in its vice-like grip, quite some time ago. But to the extent that I had a choice in my part of this cloudy relationship, I have thrown in the towel with a resounding “yes”.
The cloud. It sounds heavenly. Alas, it is not like the one which William Wordsworth described that “floats on high o’er hills and vales”.
It is the tech era’s euphemism (and like the best of those, the total opposite of what pertains in reality) for those supermax prisons for data.
They are vast monolithic structures, usually out in the desert somewhere, wherein are deposited almost every electronic communication between humans and perhaps computers that has taken place in developed countries over the past several decades.
There is really no way you can stay up-to-date in your business now unless you get on to somebody’s cloud. I have just done so with a new accounting software programme called Xero (which I highly recommend for small business owners like me who want an easier and more responsive way to do their accounts), and an email marketing programme called GetResponse. These two programmes alone contain almost everything I use to earn a living and account for all the transactions which enable it.
For my printed publications I have a free parking space on issuu.com, to which anybody can go to read thousands of magazines for free.
I also have paid-for space on the weekly.com site, where I operate the developing website for Who’s Who in Barbados Business.
I also back up data to Goggle Drive and Dropbox instead of keeping it on a hard drive in my office. I used to be wary of doing this, but then I realised the obvious – that my data was actually less safe if I stored it in just another place in my office, literally a few feet away from where I created it.
Of course, I long ago joined the iTunes cloud, which just last week got bigger with the launch of its new streaming music service, Apple Music, and world radio station, Beats1. Apple is trying to catch up with Spotify, the world’s largest streaming music service, which has 75 million subscribers.
When Steve Jobs invested the iTunes Store, his idea was to turn the early streaming of music – which was geared to “sharing” for free – into a legitimate business, where you bought your music online and downloaded your “copy”, instead of buying it on a CD.
Now the online music store is seeing declining sales, giving way to subscription services where you just rent a listening post on someone’s music cloud. Hence Apple’s launch of its own streaming service. Isn’t it ironic?
Please note that I am not using this column as some sort of marketing tool and I am not trying to promote any of these endeavours. I am just giving you my experiences to provide talking points for one or two observations.
The difference between these websites and all of the others I visit every day is that I have skin the game: if one of them were to go down for any length of time I would not be able to run my business or earn my living. That’s why, initially, I was so wary of paying for space on so many “clouds”.
Then the other day, I forgot to pay my electricity bill. It was about $250 for two months and because of the arrears (all $125 worth of them), you-know-who threw a bucket of ice-cold water on my business. They pulled the plug on my electricity service.
I had to run out and pay quickly, and call and beg them to re-connect my service the same afternoon (to their credit they did).
So I reckoned, if a couple hundred dollars for fossil-fuel derived electricity can stop my business in its tracks, then what do I have to lose by going into the cloud, many of whose data prisons are now being power directly by the sun?
They are far less likely to cut your service as long as you pay the US$10 to US$30 per month they typically cost. So, for, say US$100 a month, I now have three or four cloud-based services which warehouse all of the data I currently use in my business. It is working great.
The only downside is to ensure that you buy only as much as you need to forego the whispers of sweet nothings in your ear (well, in your email) to sign up for more storage or online software programmes than you really need, because for every one of those I actually use there are several competitors all vying for your custom.
Wordsworth was rescued from his lonely wanderings by seeing a massive row of daffodils.
I have been freed from mine by signing up for a massive row of data/software prisons. Somehow it doesn’t seem as romantic.
