Making a long story short, I had built an entirely in-house M$ shop supported by people I hired plus occasional consulting especially for network / Cisco support. We had about 12 servers, 160 desktops, a very elaborate WAN, M$ Suite plus an in-house M$ WSUS for their flood of updates. The team was 3 people: myself, a sys admin and a desktop tech.
The workload was heavy and I relied on the motivation of the two hired staff to be learning M$ stuff toward becoming full M$ experts. The overall economics of in-house machines and fully burdened in-house staff made sense for a while.
The people problems started as competition between my two staff people. Productivity and teamwork began to stink; deadlines were flaunted; Helpdesk calls took longer. For a million different reasons (excuses) neither I nor the organization found a way to deal with the people problems. We had built in an addiction to in-house expertise and when our own people went sour nobody, myself included, had the cojones to correct it.
So we started to look at web apps. The economics were looking good. Buy more bandwidth, pay the monthly costs and get rid of at least 1 bad actor, maybe both! I left their employment mostly for personal reasons, a death in the family. But even so, "mostly" is the key word.
Six months later the organization has increased the bandwidth and (temporarily?) solved lots of WAN performance issues. The people problems and how to support the burden of M$ apps and their security issues remains unsolved. Status quo.
In summary, I agree with all the technical reasons and security concerns expressed about web / cloud apps. It was people-problems that blew down the house.
Upon reflection, this calls for LO to build a community of support people that can support small to medium sized businesses and avoid the siren call of M$ style big money and big ego. Good luck! No, seriously, good luck to us all.
-- David S. CramptonOn Wed, 14 Dec 2011 07:35:51 -0800, webmaster for Kracked Press Productions <webmaster@krackedpress.com> wrote:
On 12/14/2011 10:18 AM, Caesar wrote:I was part of the movement. I even saw PCs used as dumb terminals for a time with software like "Kermit" being used since it had the ability to upload/download the files to the central systems like we do with FTP clients and the web.On Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:07:38 -0500, webmaster for Kracked Press Productions<webmaster@krackedpress.com> wrote Re Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: When will be a Web-Version of OOo/LO available?:Personally, I do not like the idea of cloud based computing, for security reasons and ownership of files. If the connection to the Internet is down on your end or theirs, you do not have access to your data.Excellent points. The whole 1980s migration from central computers w/dumb terminals to PCs was motivated in large part by the desire to spread the computing load and sever the "umbilical cord/chain" that central mainframe computers required. In most rural areas of the U.S. today, dial-up modem is as good as it gets, and that won't facilitate the "cloud".Yes, I know a lot of people who either can only get dial-up in their areas, or cannot afford the price for broadband. I am currently lucky to have broadband, but with a fixed income, and the fees going up for everything, I may not have it in the future. Or, I may keep it and drop my current digital phone system for some cheaper and less reliable one that is based off my PC or my purchased network device that does Internet phone calls.So, if you want to use cloud computing and file storage, you better remain in the cities. In the more rural areas where people like to live to get away from the crowd, you are out of luck.
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