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by stroboskop 5059 days ago
Most people are complaining about the headline, but it is in line with what Woz is saying:

"I really worry about everything going to the cloud," he said. "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."

He added: "With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away" through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to.

"I want to feel that I own things," Wozniak said. "A lot of people feel, 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it."

I wouldn't be surprised if many people around HN do not agree with Woz. After all the cloud is how many here earn their living.

That said, Woz is absolutely right. I wish more people of his standing would speak up.

3 comments

> I wouldn't be surprised if many people around HN do not agree with Woz. After all the cloud is how many here earn their living. That said, Woz is absolutely right.

There's a weird split. People running a service do not want to have to depend on a 3rd party service; but they do want to encourage other people to depend on the service that they are providing.

If I put my thesis paper and vacation photos on a service that uses EC2 as a backend, I'm not a competitor to either the service or Amazon.

If I'm the provider of said service, Amazon are a potential competitor.

Which is why you make sure that you can easily switch to something else if you need to.
What he says may be true, but convenience + cheap wins out (almost) every time.
Most people around HN don't seem to have a problem with using a non-free and closed source operating system. Ultimately, it's all about trusting a company. People who use OSX trust Apple, without asking to see the source code of any part of it. Likewise, in the case of cloud users, it will be trusting another company such as Dropbox or Google. For private data, you can encrypt. For critical data, you can keep local copies.