The cloud bubble is inflating

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 06/21/2012 - 16:09

Someone sent me a link to a new cloud-based service that takes your scanned receipts and stores them all in the cloud. Really? Really? As a long time business owner, I'll cheerfully admit that I do not enjoy keeping track of receipts, but I've never, not even once, thought, "This would all be a lot easier if I stored all these on a server far far away." Because we are reasonably well-organized from a bookkeeping perspective, all the company receipts get filed in one of a handful of file folders. Not even once a month do we need to dig a receipt out. When we do need to find one, it usually takes less than fifteen seconds.

It is starting to feel like deja vu all over again; specifically, it is starting to feel like 1998, when a lot of people were running around promoting some kind of "it's the next great Web idea." By late 2001, virtually all of the 1998 start ups were gone. A bubble is inflated by irrational expectations, and that's what I see happening now. Just because some kind of data or information can be stored in the cloud does not mean it should be. And there are only so many things we can reasonably afford to store in the cloud. Yes, we could scan all our receipts and put them in the cloud. But we'll have to pay for that, monthly, forever. The cost of storing the paper versions is about a buck a year for some new file folders, and a few of inches of space in a bankers storage box for long time storage.

As I have noted before, a lot of people are going to end up losing valuable data when their cloud service goes bankrupt and the servers disappear off the 'net, with no way to get their data back.