Crazy for changing our minds about the cloud?

Maria says we’re wrong for changing our minds about the cloud
TC, You may remember this piece, which I did indeed send off to all of my friends. I’ve always believed in your advice, & am now wondering why the article below & “The Cloud & Other Things” https://thundercloud.net/infoave/new/?p=2499 are completely at odds…. Please tell us you were possessed by the Devil, or at least why your view of the cloud has done a 180…

The Disturbing Tale of Windows Live Mail
http://thundercloud.net/infoave/answers/2009/live.htm

Our answer
The article you cite was written in 2009…over 2 1/2 years ago. Anyone who doesn’t re-evaluate their positions and reconsider their opinions aren’t really going to be people you can trust to give you accurate information, right?

The world has changed a lot in 2 years, but the Internet and the devices connecting to it have changed far more rapidly. The first iPad didn’t come along until over a year after we wrote that article – who knew that tablet PCs would become so popular? Tablet PCs would be far less useful without the cloud. Smart Phones were around but they weren’t in use by the majority of cell phone users. Now they are everywhere – and they too are very dependent on the cloud.

Even Windows Live Mail has made substantial changes in the last 2 years – including allowing users to decide which accounts they want in the cloud and which they want to store locally – a feature that was missing in the version we were testing at that time and which we subsequently wrote about.

We still don’t like Windows Live Mail – or the Windows Live Bundle. But the reasons we don’t like it are less about the cloud, than about Microsoft trying to ram products down peoples’ throats by bundling one product that people may want with a bunch of others they don’t want.

We once recommended WOT too – and you can dig out articles where we sung its praises. But as we saw the direction they were taking their program – we realized it was not something that we would ever use or recommend again. We don’t need a toolbar telling us what political, religious or social positions are acceptable, and that is just what WOT does in our opinion.

We’ve also re-evaluated and changed our position on other things too – IncrediMail for example. At one time we could not recommend it, but now we recommend it with the caveat that we only recommend the paid version – and not the free version.

We are constantly reevaluating the programs and services we recommend. You should be glad we do. You should be very careful about listening to people who refuse to change their minds regardless of the changes that are always taking place.

Finally, we’re not recommending or jumping up and down with joy about the cloud. The cloud exists and it will continue to grow because it offers so many advantages over the old way of doing things. That’s not to say there aren’t dangers and disadvantages to it, but the advantages and conveniences it offers far outweigh the bad.

You could say automobiles are dangerous because they kill and maim people. You could say they’re bad because they pollute the atmosphere and are using up whatever petroleum we have left in the ground and under the sea and ice. But the advantages and the conveniences that cars bring to us are greater than the disadvantages. There may come a day when using a computer with everything stored on a huge local hard drive might seem as antiquated as the horse and buggy does to us today

We might not like a lot of things about the cloud, but that doesn’t matter. The cloud exists and it’s growing faster than we ever imagined.

If we don’t keep up with things and we don’t re-evaluate our positions on things based on fresh information and observation then we’d be doing you and everyone else a disservice. We hope we never become that stubborn or that self-assured that we think we can never be wrong.

We’ll change our minds on other things as time goes by – nothing is as sure as change. We can only give you the best we can give you based on the information we have at the time. Things change and we change too. And that’s a good thing.

The day we stop changing our minds after re-evaluation and thought, is the day you should call us out on it.