The cloud is the new shiny hotness. Has a very low barrier to entry, it's relatively easy to get started. And the powers that be get a nice shiny new bit of jargon to toss about at meetings. Now for the negatives. While there's a low barrier to entry, there's a very high barrier to exit. If the service starts to have issues, what's the exit strategy? What recourse do you have if they raise their prices, change the EULA/SLA? Can you get your data out and easily move to another provider or move it in-house? Does it play nice with your internal environment (LDAP, Single Sign-on)? What if the service goes down? There are some serious business continuity issues that rarely get addressed. These are questions the check writers seem to fail to ask. Instant gratification, but potentially long term pain. They just want to solve an immediate problem without taking long-term consideration. Human nature. "Here you go! We bought this this new shiny cloudy thingy... now make it work." On the bright side, if the cloud drops a deuce, kinda not our problem. We tried to warn you, but you did it anyway, and it negatively impacted business. Now an internal cloud... That's cool.

After going through the hell that is deploying adobe software (Acrobat Pro), no fecking way. They appear to be operating under the delusion that we all have unlimited disk space, RAM, and bandwidth. 1.5gb? Seriously???? And their patching "strategy" (msp fiels ina very specific order. Have to start back at the .0 rev and patch your way forward) is one of the biggest clusterfucks I've come across in recent memory. There are far better alternatives out there, more efficient, less expensive.

Schools, like it or not, are having to assume responsibility, or have it forced upon them, by the kid's parents who AREN'T taking responsibility along with socienty at large. Lots of responsibility, minimal authority. So they go all risk-management over stuff like this, weld the baby to the bathwater, and over the side it goes. All about image, and the school board (or their counsel) likely is afraid of being accused of doing nothing. Interestingly, the school is not at all mentioned in the video. They definitely stepped over a line here.

And you don't want to have to compete on SERVICE, only features. Much harder to compete if the protocol is open, and consumers have actual CHOICE. In the end openness could make for a better product, but only if Skype is up to the task.

The BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.

Actually I would prefer android over iPhone. But the freedom to install software that may not be approved by the vendor or service provider is critical, and if I choose to install a full distro I want to be able to do that. I don't want to pay for the privilege of being stuck in someone's restrictive silo.

1) Android IS Linux. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) 2) Doesn't mean you cannot run tablet apps. I for one do not want to have the vendor or service provider able to dictate to me what I can or cannot run on the device that I paid for, or how I chose to do so. I have an iPhone. It's ok, but requiring a computer program to manage it that is not cross-platform. There'd be no windows version if Steve thought he wouldn't lose revenue. Every app has to pass through the apple sphincter.

Because THEN you can do what you want with it, not just what the fecking vendor/service provider says you can do.

It's not a problem. It's a feature to keep it available to everyone.

...so it doesn't NEED malware protection. wait. that's CRAZY talk.

Funny, didn't see one thing about how well it works on Mac/*nix/mobile devices. Did I miss something?

So they're going to be taught rote skills, ie how to use MS Word, as opposed to how use a "word processor", so if they're asked by their employer to use something besides Word, they're screwed? ...Awesome

What I was getting at is that all the tools are already there. For people who need "point and click and shiny", yes I would agree, but there's so much more flexibility and control with the tools that do exist in *nix, that at least IMO emulating windows technology is just going to be too restrictive. Once one is willing to explore just a little bit, the power in unix is quite breathtaking, esp when compared to what you get with windows. Yeah, there's a learning curve, but it's not too bad.

okay, technically speaking, that's true. let me put it another way. Like windows, spreadsheets have a shallow learning curve, but do not scale very well. To do anything serious, you will quickly abandon the former for the latter.

In *nix, you don't *need* Group Policy. And there's no smells-of-ass, cluster-fuck registry "technology" to deal with. AD started out life as a stunted, dumbed down LDAP server. A poor copy of Novell's NDS. Granted it's gotten better, but it's still more restrictive than it needs to be. Applying windows technology in this case is like calling a spreadsheet a database.