Has this ever happened to you? You're sitting in an airport (in my case at the moment it's the Philadelphia airport) and you try fruitlessly for an hour to connect to your cloud-based server because that's where everything is nowadays. It's in "The Cloud." But...uh-oh...the router or something isn't available. And neither is your Verizon 3G-or-4G-or whateverG-service. You're dead in the water. You've been there, right? That's where I am right now. Luckily, I'm able to do something else. I have a local version of Microsoft Office installed on my laptop. That way I can write this essay. Maybe you're that fortunate. Maybe you're not. Chances are you've been rendered, once again, unproductive.
I shouldn't complain. For goodness sake, look at how much great technology is available to the typical small business today as compared to just a few years ago. The Cloud has changed the way we work. Software applications can now be hosted in a more secure way and made available to us and our employees through all sorts of portable devices wherever we are. I get that. And I appreciate that. But we've also been told to drink the Kool Aid and believe that The Cloud is the answer to all of our technological woes. And when it works it's a glorious thing. But The Cloud for small business is still a work in progress. It doesn't work all the time.
For many software companies, not working all the time is the norm (hey...what's maintenance and support for anyway, right?) As I sit here awaiting for my flight to Austin I give thanks to God that software companies do not make airplanes. Because if they did I'd likely make it as far as Atlanta. Maybe.
I've lived my business life in The Cloud in 2012. As have hundreds of my clients. So please don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. I know what I'm talking about. And in 2012 The Cloud earned a C+. It's like a smart student that's not working up to her potential.
Why?
For starters, you still can't rely on the uptime of cloud-based applications. Just about every major cloud provider, from Amazon to Google to Facebook to Twitter (and many others) all had significant outages last year. You may tsk tsk at those who complain because they couldn't chat with their Facebook friends for an hour or two. But there are countless businesses that are staking their livelihoods on the reliability of these services. And you may say that they do a better job than I could do if I host my applications on my server. Except they don't. My office's Internet service never went down (except for one time when there was a storm) and my server always ran because I had an IT guy in once a month and we replaced things before they broke. Downtime could cost a small business hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost business or opportunities. When a small business person reads about these outages we get nervous. And now some of these services want to handle our electronic payments too? Yes, we will do this. But most of my clients aren't ready to do this yet.
Connections continue to suck. Just ask my fellow travelers here in the Philadelphia International Airport. If your employees are going to rely on a cloud-based application or service they need to get online. We've come a long way in the past few years. In some places it's great! In other places it doesn't exist. Such was the state of affairs in 2012. Some say just rely on my mobile phone to connect. Except Verizon isn't giving me their famous service here in the food court either. Why not? I don't know. All I do know is that I can't connect. So I can't do work. The Cloud makes its promises. But there are still too many weak spots in the system for it to fully deliver.
And when we encounter a dead zone we're rendered inoperable, if you're fortunate enough to connect then get ready to slow down. Because oftentimes performance is sketchy at best. Sure, we've come a long way since dial up and if you haven't figured it out by now I'm clearly an angry middle-aged guy. But am I being so unreasonable? Technologists and cloud companies are promising me a reliable fast service. And I'm paying monthly user and access fees based on this promise. And the reality in 2012 was I did not get that kind of service most of the time. Sometimes was fast. Most of the time it was...OK. And some of the time it was so slow it was not even worth going online. Which forced me to do something else...not on the Cloud.
This is all bad but you know what's the worst? That sinking, nauseas, panicky feeling you get when something is truly wrong. Like when you have a great Internet connection but the cloud server is down. Or you connect to your application but stuff looks funny or isn't working right. Or when you're trying to run that report and getting "page cannot be found" messages. That's when you have to call support. Oh no.
A lot of business owners like the control of being able to fix stuff on their own. We are independent people who don't like to rely on others when we can avoid it. But in The Cloud you are forced to rely on support people. Some of them are really competent. Others are merely answering services who are part of the "Small Business Support Plan" (translation: try to make money off your small business customers by providing a sub-par service provided by sub-par, lower cost people) offered by your cloud provider.
Will all this get better? Of course it will! I'm optimistic. I see the direction of things, of technology. And I appreciate how powerful technology, particularly cloud based technology can be to help me run my business. But we're still not there yet. So small business owners, just beware: The Cloud isn't the magical thing that so many make it out to be. Not yet. Understand its limitations. I've been living with these limitations. Maybe in a few years I'll be happily giving The Cloud an A. But last year, it's a C+.
