How Google convinced me that cloud computing isn’t ready for prime time

Cloud computing seems to be the direction that software makers want to push the computer industry, having all of your applications and data residing on servers rather than on your computer’s hard drive. It sounds fine, so long as you have a fast internet connection and never intend on working anywhere that doesn’t internet access. If you want to work somewhere without internet access, well… That is where things start to come apart. Granted, some of the applications offer offline access - Google Docs was having a beta test for some users to be able to use Google Docs in an offline mode and then upload their data once they got an internet connection again - the best part about the Google applications is that they are free whereas Microsoft and other software companies would likely charge you for their services on a monthly or yearly basis, meaning that your total cost of ownership would be an ever increasing amount. The draw of cloud computing was that it was largely free to the consumer, but that comes at a price. Google Mail is a free service and many people rely heavily on it for business and personal use, but what happens if something goes wrong with it? You have no recourse other than to wade through forums and how-to articles that may or may not resolve your issue, there is no tech support number to call and no chat room to talk to anyone at Google about what may be going on with your account. You may be thinking that problems with GMail never happen, but I have talked to people who have been locked out of their accounts and have missed days worth of mail that was important to their livelihood and they have no recourse other than wading through the forums mentioned earlier.
For cloud computing to be successful it must meet certain requirements, the first of which is that the online programs must be either free or significantly cheaper than their offline counterparts. It would make no sense to pay over a hundred dollars a year for an online program that does the basic job of Microsoft Word but without the extras. The second requirement is that they must offer some form of technical support to their users, either through telephone support or through online chat. If you are asking a business to rely on cloud computing than you have to be prepared for when something goes wrong and important business data is lost in the cloud - and that costs money and that can be a problem when trying to meet the first requirement of being very low in cost. The final requirement is that these programs must be available in offline form for those times when people are not able to access the internet, be it in the air or on the ground somewhere that does not offer internet access, work still needs to be done even if there is no access to the cloud.
In the end, I believe that tech savvy people are getting ahead of themselves on this cloud computing phenomenon, they might want to take a step back and realize that the average computer user still has problems doing basic things on their computers - such as minimizing and maximizing windows, finding programs that aren’t already pre-installed on the desktop, and connecting to a wireless network - asking them to use online services without a safety net such as technical support is a bit of a lofty goal at this point.