Me and the Cloud

Don’t get me wrong, I love the boys in my company’s IT department (and by “boys”, I mean all of them regardless of gender).  That said, the coming Cloud Revolution can’t come fast enough for me.

Picture this:  Last week of the fiscal quarter, midst of a challenging economy, supporting users on every continent except Antarctica.  At that point, I asked if I could be upgraded to Microsoft Office 2010, as I wanted to try out a particular feature to see if it would solve a business problem.  By the time the dust settled, I had lost roughly 2 full days of productivity and was struggling to learn Windows 7 and to reload all my local apps.  I’m still only about 80% back to full efficiency.

Was it the fault of IT?  No, they did their best to satisfy my request, with the tools they had.  Instead, I blame the continuing paradigm of locally owned programs.  In the 21st century, with an always on, broadband connection, it‘s crazy that my non-mobile workstation has living on it buckets of software.  They belong in the Cloud, administered and upgraded by someone who does that for a living and who isn’t worried about getting the VP his fiscal reports.

Thank heavens for Salesforce and come quickly, the rest of you SaaS apps!