According to the thought-provoking post, many developing countries are skipping straight over more traditional on-site tech and moving straight to embracing cloud solutions:

I read recently that Rajan Anandan, Google’s managing director for India, says that his country will be a ‘Cloud-first’ market for computing. The companies there, in other words, will go from having very little information technology (as is the case now) directly to embracing Cloud computing without ever going through the intermediary steps of mainframe-, mini-, client-server-, or PC-based computing.

Of course, Google employees all over the world are talking up the Cloud, but I think Anandan’s on to something. Just as many countries in the developing world have largely skipped over land-line telephony and moved straight from having virtually no phones at all to having tons of mobile phones, so too might something similar happen with corporate computing.

McAfee goes on to argue that many established America companies are unwilling to follow suit and rapidly embrace the cloud and that may be disastrous, drawing a parallel to a much earlier upheaval in tech:

A hundred years ago, American factories were in the process of converting from steam to electric power. It was a long, slow, uneven process. And it was led by startup companies and new buildings — the older ones just couldn’t justify the switch to themselves intellectually or financially — it wasn’t clear why electricity was so much better, but it was clear how much it would cost to convert an incumbent.

And how did the incumbents fare as the manufacturing industry transitioned from one power delivery mode to another? By 1935, over 40 percent of the big industrial trusts formed by 1905 had failed, and 10 percent more were limping along. Of the incumbents that survived, most became much smaller, with market shares declining by a third, on average, by the 1930s…. Will Cloud computing be similarly important? Will it contribute to large competitive shifts not only among IT vendors, but also among consumers of technology?

It’s a fascinating point to ponder and obviously an issue of great strategic priority if you’re one of the folks sitting atop an established firm deciding whether to get rid of most of your servers. But McAfee’s focus on how bad stodgy reluctance to change might be for big western firms opens up an equal opportunity to ponder how good the shift to the cloud might be for scrappy start-ups in the developing world, looking to generate not only profits but also general prosperity. Major shifts are, as McAfee, points out, not only a great danger for established firms, but also a great opportunity for the little guys who struggle to get started in a stable market.

Could the shift to the cloud be a major opportunity for entrepreneurs in the developing world? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user mikecogh.

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“A hotel is a microcosm of a corporation,” he said explaining how the company has a variety of different technology needs. However, he’s sensitive to the fact that InterContinental doesn’t own most of the hotels it manages, which means he doesn’t force technology down the throats of the hotel owners. Instead he lets different hotels act as incubators for ideas, believing that successful ideas will get adopted.

“We have research friendly hotels that want to the latest trick and that gets people’s attention,” Conophy said. From there it can spread like wildfire as one hotel owner talks to another. He went on to explain to any entrepreneurs hoping to get their foot in the door at the hotel chain, that they should be prepared to explain how they are different from their competitor and send someone who isn’t a “junior level salesman.”

He also predicted that the bandwidth in hotels would increase over time, although he didn’t get specific or explain if hotels would keep charging exorbitant rates for that access.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
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Office 365 is not Microsoft’s first attempt at offering this kind of service; it has previously offered hosted Exchange and SharePoint services with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services). But by including Office Web Apps in Office 365, the company now has a much more rounded product that enables users to do their work anywhere, on any device, and to easily collaborate with others.

Office 365 vs. Google Apps for Business

One of Office 365′s main advantages over Google Apps is the huge existing installed user base of Office products. Office is entrenched in the majority of businesses worldwide, and Office 365 offers an easy pathway for those users to migrate to cloud collaboration while using familiar tools. Office 365 also has a greater range of features than Google Apps, incorporating office productivity (Office and Office Web Apps), collaboration and intranet tools (SharePoint Online), email and calendars (Exchange Online) and instant messaging and web conferencing (Lync Online).

Unlike some previous Microsoft releases, Office 365 works cross-platform, so it can be accessed equally via Mac and PC and on mobile devices — although there are reports that mobile access from some devices is limited. Office Web Apps, in particular, is an impressive suite of products, and while they aren’t complete cloud-based replacements for the desktop Office apps — they don’t offer the full range of functionality that desktop apps do — Microsoft obviously invested a lot of effort in making the user experience very similar. The interface is familiar, and documents look identical in Office Web Apps and in the desktop applications. By enabling seamless round-trip working between Office Web Apps and Office desktop applications, Office 365 can also work when users are offline, something that can’t be said of Google Apps.

Of course, Google believes that its product is superior. On Monday, in a post titled “365 reasons to consider Google Apps” on the official Google Enterprise blog, Google Apps Product Manager Shan Sinha aimed a few barbs at Office 365, saying that it is designed for usage by individuals, not by teams; that its pricing is complex; and that Office 365 doesn’t have proven cloud reliability, while Google Apps has a record of 99.9 percent uptime. Some of Sinha’s points are debatable: Office 365 does enable co-editing and collaboration, for example, and Microsoft has plenty of experience in offering cloud-based services, even if Office 365 itself is new.

Easy migration to cloud productivity for existing Office users

With its higher price point, Office 365 might not tempt existing corporate users of Google Apps for Business away, particularly as migrating between the two services is unlikely to be straightforward. However, that’s probably not the market that Microsoft is aiming at. Rather, it wants to keep hold of the huge numbers of business customers with existing investments in the Office product line. For them, Office 365 is a well-designed product that offers an easy migration route to cloud-based office productivity at a reasonable price point with products that will feel very familiar to their users. I think that will make Office 365 a compelling proposition for many business customers, in particular smaller businesses that would like to offer their employees the ability to work and collaborate remotely using familiar Microsoft tools but don’t want to have to make an upfront investment in, and then maintain, their own SharePoint and Exchange servers.

Office 365 is available on a number of different plans, starting at around $6 per user per month for small businesses with less than 25 users; enterprise customers have access to plans including dedicated support. For comparison, Google Apps for Business costs around $4 per month.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

“Untethered,” for most of us, isn’t technical jargon for how hardware communicates, shares or connects, but rather the ability to work unrestrained, able to jump from one activity to the next without cumbersome hardware and software slowing us down.

In the end, however, it isn’t just the technology that must evolve and set the stage for a new way of working. As users, we must embrace change as well and be willing to move away from old ways of thinking and working. We can begin by moving to a more simplified cloud-based setup.

Step 1: Gradually Move to the Cloud

One of the best ways to simplify the way we work is by reducing our reliance on location-dependent software and hardware. Over the years, I’ve gradually moved away from using a single computer; now the bulk of my work is available online, and where I once worried about the inevitable computer crash that would create days of additional work and headache, I can now simply move to any other computer with an Internet connection and barely miss a beat.

With the advent of services like Google Docs, it’s much easier to stop thinking in terms of the solution and instead focus on the medium or output. Instead of using local programs for things like documents and spreadsheets, for example, we can opt for online applications, like Office Web Apps, Google Docs and Zoho, that can handle these types of files.

Step 2: Minimize

To create a centralized “dashboard” for your work, begin weeding out extra steps that might currently exist in your setup by trying to moving away from using solutions that only handle particular problems or tasks.

Simon wrote about this from a developer’s standpoint in a GigaOM Pro article, Enterprise 2.0: Web Apps and the Patchwork Quilt Problem (sub. req.). As a user, you can adopt a simpler way of working by taking a minimalist approach to software and hardware. Instead of using a separate application for each problem, figure out ways to re-purpose what’s already in your toolbox, or adopt different tools that can address more of your needs.

You might currently use ten separate programs to manage an equal number of smaller tasks, and although this approach might be effective at alleviating specific pain points, it creates an often greater problem of tracking the applications being used, as well as syncing, searching for, and accessing information across multiple platforms. By reducing the number of tools you use to the “lowest effective dose,” you can greatly improve productivity and the ease in which you work. Zoho, for example, offers project management, web conferencing, invoicing and a host of other business solutions in one stop.

One word of caution: While I’m trying to keep my day-to-day tools and apps be kept to a minimum, I’m still very aware of the risks of relying on a single solution. It pays to back up important work and information in a second location, in order to not become overly dependent on any one platform.

As we transition to cloud computing, our main goal is to keep things simple and to make the process of work faster and more effective, and while technology is gradually improving to make work and life easier, as users, we still have to learn to embrace the change to achieve it.

Do you think technology has made work easier or more complicated for the end user?

Photo courtesy Flickr user ralphbijker

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Working entirely in the cloud is not by any means the norm, and it probably won’t be for quite a few years, but Chrome OS has some very attractive features for enterprise customers, as Google was quick to point out when it unveiled the Cr-48 beta units it would be sending out for pre-release testing. Most importantly, the technology will be cheap, which will really come in handy when businesses have to outfit an increasingly large staff of telecommuters.

More and more of our daily computing activities are making their way to the cloud, but what kind of effect will that have on productivity? To anticipate the impact of a cloud-based remote workforce, look at the last time there was a revolution in the way workers connected: the advent and rise of the Internet.

Productivity among U.S. non-farm businesses grew at a rate of 2.5 percent per year during the period between 1995 and 2000. From 1973 to 1995, productivity had grown only 1.3 percent per year. Yes, it’s true that the web brought YouTube, Facebook and email as well as many other potential distractions, but there’s no denying that it significantly improved worker productivity on the whole.

The groundwork that allowed for that spike in productivity was laid around a decade before, as businesses started to really invest in IT and in the early 80s, an investment which began to pay off in the mid-90s as workers really learned how to take advantage of the new tools available to them.

Similarly, business has been investing in the cloud for some time now. Google anticipated the curve, housing its productivity suite Google Docs completely on the web, beyond local storage. Gmail, too, has become more than just email, and now operates almost as a cloud-based CRM, calendar and task management product. Many similar offerings are available from other vendors, but users haven’t yet left behind local files and started working exclusively in the cloud.

Just as Internet search, email and instant communications reduced the need for letters, faxes, reference material and time-consuming phone calls, soon cloud-based production and collaboration will reduce the need for digital transmission of documents, uploading and downloading files, redundant rework by multiple teammates and more. You won’t have to worry about whether a client has the files, or the right version, or anything like that, because you’ll just authorize them for the cloud-based content of your choosing, and they’ll have instant access. It won’t be something that happens with a few clients here and there, but as natural as using Windows Explorer or Finder in OS X. But it can only happen once enterprise and worker uptake of and comfort with the tools catches up to  the IT investment.

It might not take ten years, as Gary Kim of TMCnet suggests, but we won’t see the real productivity gains ushered in by cloud computing until it achieves the same kind of widespread adoption achieved by the original Internet technologies. Once we do, however, and remote workers see it as the foundation upon which all of their work is based, cloud computing’s effect on overall business productivity could rival that of even the wide adoption of the Internet.

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Coupled with the increase in Internet bandwidth, cloud computing has facilitated the development of many of the fantastic web apps that I use and love today as services like Amazon’s EC2 and S3 and Google’s App Engine has lowered the app vendors’ startup costs and provided reliable scalability for when their user bases grow.

When it comes to mobility and collaboration, cloud computing has delivered advances that I already take for granted. Because I primarily work in the cloud, I can access my work from anywhere, using a multitude of devices. This is beneficial beyond just being able to hop between a desktop machine and a laptop. When most of one’s tools live online, switching from PC to Mac (or vice versa) is much less burdensome than it could have been in the past. And if I suddenly found that my main laptop had died, my Time Machine backup was corrupted and I only had in iPad  to work on — as happened to designer Shane Pearlman recently — it wouldn’t be an absolute disaster.

Having my work available online makes collaboration far easier than it ever was before. Rather than emailing files to my colleagues and trying (and failing) to keep track of all the different versions, using a tool like Google Docs means I can have one document that everyone can access — it’s even possible to have more than one person editing that document at any one time, if I wish. Couple that kind of access with project management and corporate social networking features and collaboration with the rest of my team, which is spread all over the globe, is a snap. And developers have seemingly only scratched the surface of the collaborative possibilities.

Personally, I love having all of my main work tools available in the cloud. It means I can always get at my work, whether I’m logging on with either of my laptops, on my phone, on a desktop machine or even using someone else’s computer — I simply open a browser, load up a few tabs and I’m ready to go.  If a hard drive failure or some other catastrophe strikes my computer, I know that my work is safe and I can get back up and running with minimal downtime.

While this veritable explosion of web apps has made all of our web working lives considerably easier, it’s also made things cheaper. While running a virtual team like WebWorkerDaily’s would still be possible without the cloud, it would probably be a lot more expensive. Instead of using an array of fairly inexpensive cloud-based tools, not only would we have to either buy or develop all the software we need, we’d also have to have the infrastructure on which to run it and hire additional staff just to keep the systems running. Without the cloud, many of the virtual businesses that have sprung up over the past few years wouldn’t exist, because the costs would be too prohibitive. And I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.

Of course, working in the cloud is not without its drawbacks and risks. It requires an Internet connection, and such connectivity is not yet ubiquitous. Data portability is also an issue, because once you start using a particular web app, it can be tricky to move your data to another service. There’s also the question of trusting web app vendors with your data — what happens if the vendor goes bust, corrupts your data somehow, or is hacked? Many of these issues can be mitigated, however — by having appropriate local backup strategies, for example — and some of them are being addressed by web app vendors themselves.

Cloud computing has clearly had a huge impact on my working life over the past few years, but I wanted to get the thoughts of the WWD readership: How has cloud computing changed the way that you work?

These outages can quickly become crises. How do you know what step to take next on a project if the project is entirely managed on a site that is currently down? How do you get in touch with a client if you usually only communicate through that same project management tool? You may not be able to work quite as fast without your tools, but these tips can help you keep the situation from escalating.

1. Have an alternative method of communication for clients and co-workers. It may seem obvious that it’s important to have multiple methods of communication, but it’s worth going beyond just having an email address for the people you work with. Depending on just what tools have gone down, there’s a possibility that an email server has gone down as well. Having a phone number or another form of communication available — even being able to send a message through a social networking tool — may be necessary to be able to get through to the folks you need to talk to.
2. Have a backup of project data. All your project information is in the cloud, right? Even if the service goes down for a little while, you’ll be fine, right? Not necessarily. There are plenty of scenarios that end with you having to recreate your project from scratch (as could happen if the app doesn’t come back up in time, or it goes bust). Having a backup of your information can offer extra peace of mind.
3. Choose a tool to keep working. Many outages are open-ended, because it can be tough to tell exactly what is necessary to bring an application back online.If you’ve got deadlines, waiting around for something to happen is not the best option. Ideally, there may be some aspect of your project that you can work on without logging in at all. If that’s not the case, there are a couple of options: consult your backup documentation or your client to see what would be most practical to work on in the mean time.
4. Discuss a new deadline. If you’re in a situation where you really can’t proceed with a project — maybe the only copies of important files are inaccessible — you may quickly realize that your current deadlines just aren’t going to be doable. If that’s the case, talk to your client or manager as soon as you can and explain the situation. If you aren’t sure how much of an extension you’ll need (a typical situation if you don’t know when your tools will be available again or if you’ll have to rebuild the project from your backup), make that clear so that you’ll have grounds for future discussions, if need be.

Unfortunately, the best methods for dealing with any kind of application outage require some prep work while your most important tools are still up — getting contact information for a client who can’t respond to the only email address you have isn’t going to move things along. In the worst-case scenario, when an outage has caught you entirely by surprise, it may be difficult to come up with a next step that will actually help you with the work. The best option may be just trying to get in touch with your client or co-worker and check what can be done at all. In the event that you can’t reach anyone, you may just have to wait out the outage and deal with the repercussions down the road.

What do you do when your web apps go down?

Image by Flickr user p4inkiller

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Don’t get me wrong. I do make limited use of cloud computing applications, especially Gmail. But mostly, I don’t feel comfortable putting my entire computing life “in the cloud”. Here’s why.

Access. Putting all my data in the cloud means I need an Internet connection to be able to do my work. This limits the times and places that I can work, and makes it more difficult to develop a plan to keep my business running in case of a utility outage. I can’t complete work offline on my laptop’s battery power and then make a short visit to an Internet connection to upload it.

Backups. Very few cloud services provide for making a local backup of customers’ online data, leaving me to trust the service itself to do it. I prefer the security of having my own data backups.

Data Loss. One particular issue that I’ve experienced with cloud services is with those set to sync with other devices or services. If one of the sync locations experiences data loss, the other locations see the lost items as deleted and delete them from their storage as well. The multiple locations don’t act as a backup, because being synced makes them vulnerable to multiplying data loss that occurs at any one of the sync locations. So I have to keep data in an additional (not synced) location to have a true backup.

Service Stability. When I buy software for my computer, I have it for as long as it is compatible with my machine’s operating system. If the software’s designer goes out of business, I can continue using it. With SaaS cloud services, I am dependent on those services continuing to operate to be able to do my work. If a cloud service closes up shop, which has been known to happen literally overnight with startup companies, I can at the minimum experience work flow disruption and possibly total data loss. Even financially stable companies like Google sometimes discontinue SaaS products, forcing users to look for a replacement, and to find a way to port data between incompatible applications.

Privacy & Security. Last, but definitely not least, putting data in the cloud raises a whole host (pun intended) of security and privacy issues. It is easier to protect data that is held on a single local machine than it is to guard against breaches on a server-based cloud system. Having a public point of log-in raises the risk of security breach via compromised password, and data can also be breached in general server attacks, not even specifically targeted to your data.

Data held on someone else’s servers is also more vulnerable to being accessed legally by subpoena than data held on a local machine (which requires a search warrant to access). A cloud service usually has no reason to invest resources in fighting legal requests for data held on their service.

So for now, I’ll keep my data (or most of it) on the ground.

Do you trust the cloud?

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When it comes to collaborative tools such as project management apps, you can usually apply different levels of access to each team member. Still, have you figured out what to do when someone from the team departs?

You have a few options:

1. Delete their account. But what happens if that account contains data that applies to work you’re still doing, or time reporting you are still running?
2. Make the account inactive. But does this mean the account still counts against your user quotas, or will it give you an open space to add a new member without increasing your service level?
3. Change the username and password. But is this really a secure option?

My company’s virtual team (over a dozen people) are using 5pm, so I contacted the company to see what they recommend doing in the situation of a team member leaving and what their service supports. They acknowledged that workers leaving a company is an interesting issue and recommended changing the login email address used on the account and the password. While they suggested using a fake email, I’m thinking using an alternative email address to which you have access would be a better solution.

5pm’s programmers are able to restore data if you accidentally delete something you didn’t intend to remove, but they also pointed to the “Backup” feature that allows you to pull your data from the cloud onto a computer before you make any changes if personnel has changed. The company is considering an “active/inactive” flag for users, but also said that since their plans are based on the number of users, they were concerned that people might turn this feature on and off to get around upgrading to a premium level.

Curious to see how other project management tools handled the issue of security when a team member departs, I approached Wrike and LiquidPlanner with my scenario as well.

The folks at Wrike suggested that the best way to protect against potential sabotage is to deal first with the issue on the HR and legal side, rather than relying on your cloud vendor. While I agree with this in theory, most startups don’t have an HR department or a legal team to enforce issues, and much of what happens with team members happens swiftly and potentially irreparably in a bad situation. Contracts can’t keep disgruntled individuals from commiting sabotage. Wrike has a “merge” feature so you can actually merge the data of one user into the account of another. The account can be kept active with a changed username and password, or removed after merging data to downgrade an account if money is an issue. The Wrike folks also say they have multiple levels of backups and a friendly, helpful customer service team at the ready to assist in a crisis situation to help retrieve lost data or protect an account. They may, however, require a fee to cover the time of their programmers.

LiquidPlanner lets you immediately “disconnect” a user from the collaborative workspace if they leave the team, so a former employee can no longer log in to view or modify the team’s project information. This feature makes their account inactive. This disconnection feature eliminates the need to change a login and password as a stop gap measure. The workspace remains secure. The inactive user’s projects and tasks will remain accessible and intact so the rest of the team can access all the data related to their account. Inactive users do not count against the user quota for a LiquidPlanner account. If you disconnect a user from a workspace at any time and then they return to the team, you can simply invite the same person back into the space by “reconnecting” them.

Before you run into a crisis situation with your project management system, here are a few things to look into today:

1. Check to see if the apps you use have a way to back up your data.
2. See what the company recommends in terms of security actions to take if a team member leaves abruptly.
3. Check if there are fees for restoring data via the company’s main backup system.
4. Write out your internal plan for keeping your company’s project management space secure.

What is your plan for keeping your collaborative spaces secure?

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How can you find a way (and the time) to do more good in the world, while still keeping up with the demands of our businesses? One solution is to focus on one trait at a time.

First, make a list of all the positive traits you would like to have (generous, responsible, helpful, supportive, etc.).

Under each item, list ways you can incorporate more of that particular trait into your daily life. For example, if you want to be more responsible within your community, you might consider sponsoring an area youth program or volunteering to maintain a local park.

Finally, set aside time each day and week to devote to your commitment. Even 15-30 minutes a day can make a big difference. If you could commit to just 15 minutes a day, five days per week, at the end of the year, you would have contributed more than 65 hours of your time to improving the world around you. That’s more than a week and a half of your attention!

Many times, we put off getting involved and doing things that we really want to do because of the belief that there just isn’t enough time. On top of that, we think that the time we do have isn’t enough to make any kind of difference, but even small contributions add up. If we can find ways to give back in even the smallest ways, we can make big changes in the world around us.

In what small ways can you make a difference in the world around you? Share your tips for getting involved while still keeping up with your business and other commitments.

Image from Flickr by laRuth.

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The cloud offers many benefits, but as the technology is still very much in its infancy, it’s hard to sort the signal from the noise and identify the real opportunities. If you’re looking to get ahead of the pack and exploit cloud computing in your next project, or simply want to check out the opportunities that it brings to the table, you should check out Structure 09, our annual cloud computing conference, returning to the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on June 25, 2009. The day will be keynoted by two pioneers in the world of “infrastructure on demand,” Marc Benioff and Paul Sagan. Sagan, CEO of Akamai, will share his vision about how Akamai continues to innovate in an industry it helped birth a decade ago. Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, will share his insights that drove Salesforce.com to become the first SaaS (Software as a Service) company to pass the billion-dollar revenue mark.

A strong base of industry leaders and innovators supports the keynote speakers. Structure 09 is proud to have Michael Stonebraker, a pioneer of database (RDBMS) systems, participating and also welcomes luminaries such as Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, and Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems, back to share their thoughts on the progress of the industry since their keynote addresses at last year’s sold-out event. In a unique panel, Jonathan Heiliger, VP of Technical Operations at Facebook, moderates a panel of his industry peers, who handle some of the biggest web infrastructures on the planet — Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn and MySpace — and asks them to share their learning and best practices from the industry’s cutting edge.

Register here now, and we’ll give you a $60 savings on your ticket. Check out our speakers and topics here.

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This isn’t the first time I’ve considered upgrading my LinkedIn account and decided against it, which led me to start thinking about all of the “freemium” apps — basically free apps with premium upgrades — I’ve been using. I started feeling guilty about taking advantage of the “free” in freemium services, especially because I’ve had the opportunity to interview founders of these companies, many of whom confess to struggling over pricing.  So what makes us decide to pay for an app?

My decision process works something like this:

1. Is it mission critical? Not every app or tool I use is critical to the well-being of my company, but some are. Our project management system? Critical. Our internal social networking system? Not so critical, because we’ve not all adopted it yet, but this could change.

2. How useful is the free version? In my WWD review, I was impressed that Deskaway‘s free version had more features than Basecamp‘s. That could have won me over, but its interface just didn’t work for me.

3. Can I live without more functionality? I used Basecamp for quite a while without ever thinking about the reporting available with a paid plan. I was getting my reports from Freshbooks, and Basecamp was just a way for me to manage client information when I was working solo. I only upgraded to the $24 per month plan when I needed to manage more projects. Payment made sense because I had so much more new work to cover the expense.

4. Should I upgrade and pay or seek out a different app? Once I began adding more team members to my company, Basecamp’s inadequacies for deeper project management became obvious. So instead of upgrading a notch or two further — and still not having the functionality we needed — we moved over to 5pm at $4/month more. Again, the cost was palatable because more team members meant greater productivity and more moving parts to manage, so it made good business sense.

5. Do the fee levels hit my sweet spot? I realize I have two tiers of apps that I am willing to pay for, each with its own sweet spot in terms of pricing. For apps that benefit the overall smooth functioning of my business and provide real value that I can quantify, I’ll pay around $25 per month. I feel comfortable having four of these. The second tier contains apps that are useful in some aspect of my work, and I’ll subscribe to up to five of these at $10 per month. That’s about my limit. Right now, I don’t have a real method for deciding how much I will pay — it’s all from the gut. But we’re working to measure the costs of doing business and the impact our apps have on our bottom line, so eventually I should have some real numbers to work with.

6. How entrenched am I? In some cases, I begin to feel “trapped” by the choice I made initially when I started with an app. If I need to upgrade and the next level is out of my price range, what then? When I left Basecamp, I couldn’t easily figure out how to migrate information over to 5pm, so I just downgraded my membership to a free plan, and now cannot figure out how to access my data so it just sits there. Over time, those assets will be outdated and no longer as valuable as they were the first months of the migration, but I still feel a sense of my data being trapped. Avoiding this trapped feeling — as well as avoiding a huge learning curve of a new app — are two big factors when deciding whether to move to another service.

7. Can I afford not to pay? If an app I’m using has a positive effect on my business’ bottom line–or moving away from it has a significant negative impact–then I’m much more likely to dish out the cash.

Back to the case of LinkedIn. The lowest monthly upgrade is $24.95. Per month. For me, that hits a sour note. I get so much benefit out of LinkedIn at the free level and have for years that there is no incentive for me to pay. Just missing out on that Quick Poll feature isn’t enough to entice me over to a paid plan.

All LinkedIn could do right now to win my paying business — possibly — is to remove the free level altogether. But by doing that, their entire business foundation would crumble as many people migrate quickly away.

How do you decide whether an app is worth paying for? Which services do you consider well worth paying for?

Image by stock.xchng user jana_koll

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I was listening to a story on NPR by Laura Sydell called Computing in the Cloud: Who Owns Your Files? The story brought back all of the fears I’ve had about working in the clouds but have suppressed because:

A. I want the convenience that cloud computing offers;

B. I recently experienced the Computer Crash of Doom and want to know I have reliable backups;

C. I want to get more work use out of my iPod Touch and cloud work is the way.

So what was the bottom line of the NPR piece?

Read the User Agreement. Yes, the gist of the story was that none of us are reading the user agreement with Google or Yahoo or any other company that is housing our emails, documents and files. We actually covered that subject last month, but hey, I’m one of those who never, ever reads the user agreement. Who has the time? Who has the brain capacity? Who likes sifting through pages and pages of legalese?

This is a problem, according to Harry Lewis, a computer science professor at Harvard. All someone has to do is accuse you of something – unproven – and the company hosting your files can simply cut you off, close your account, no questions asked, rather than entering into a legal battle.

There are no rules and more importantly – no laws – when it comes to hosting your files.

Ever since I went to Gmail in the clouds from Apple’s Mail on my computer, I’ve wondered “what would happen if Gmail went down…forever?” The entire record of my work over the last three years would be gone. I tried backing up all of my historical Gmails onto my computer once but it was a major undertaking and never became a habit.

If we aren’t reading the user agreements, how can we protect ourselves from major loss in the clouds?

1. Backups of backups? Does it make sense to have the copy on your harddrive along with the copy online? Lately, I’ve been composing my documents in Google Docs and only saving them back on my harddrive as needed. Should I do it as a rule?

2. Backups of backups of backups? Once I save my docs on my computer, my Time Capsule captures them every hour on the hour. But is there a way to get my Time Capsule to pull my cloud work into a backup drive? Or is that an app that is on the way because it is a critical process that is missing from cloud computing?

3. Distributed files. Does it make sense not to have all of your work and files on one system? Sure it seems convenient and integrated to use all of Google’s cloud working solutions, but should we put some of our work – or back up some of our work – on other sites? Like using Dropbox file storage as a repository for anything and everything from everywhere?

4. Being selective. Do we need to be more selective about what we are willing to put online, keep online, and work on in the clouds? Are we getting a little too careless and thoughtless about the ease of cloud computing or rushing to it without a security plan in place because it seems like the place we need to be?

No technology is failsafe or foolproof. When we are using technology for “convenience,” but have to back up that technology “just in case,” are we losing some of that convenience that we are craving? It seems that, as usual, nothing is ultimately free and everything comes with a price.

How much are you willing to spend – and risk – on cloud computing and how are you backing up your work?

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