The cloud shooting itself on the foot: dispatch.io/.cc and do.com

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 26, 2013 at 06:12 PM

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>But in the mid- and long-term, how many users that have been
>disillusioned by such business behaviour are likely to invest their time
>and entrust their valuable data on online tools again, if they can help
>it?

I don’t think there are any easy solutions to this. The cloud revolution is not going away, and start-ups (or their investors) will always be tempted to exercise their exit strategy by selling out to a large corporation with deep pockets.

I would be more likely to trust a service that is a labour of love and run by two guys from their garage, than a hip start-up with huge VC support from the Valley… The former might be around longer, even if the rise is more spectacular of the latter…

But then I am not a business buyer, so the cloud services I tend to use for my professional needs (the likes of Workflowy and Gingko) are probably less attractive for large corporations to acquire (and kill off), and they are more likely to survive on subscriptions from enthusiasts (probably many of them academics and their students).

It also comes down to the question of how users can minimise the risks of service termination by demanding features from these services to back up data off-line on a regular basis, and be able to export it in a format that can be used in other software.